Maid Maleen: a fairytale study of trauma?

This essay was originally published nearly two years ago in the 12th issue of Gramarye, Winter 2017
(It will take you a while to read! 😊 ) 

Maid Maleen (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, tale 198) isn’t particularly popular as fairy tales go. It was first published as Jungfer Maleen[1] 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.        

Here is a brief account of their version: Maid Maleen, whose heart is already set on another prince, refuses to marry the suitor her father the king has chosen for her. To punish her, the king orders a dark tower to be built. Provisioning it for seven years, he seals his daughter and her maid up inside it, cutting them off from light. ‘There they sat in the darkness and knew not when day or night began.’ 

At first Maid Maleen’s lover rides uselessly around the tower calling her name, but no sound penetrates the walls and he finally gives up. The seven years pass, and Maid Maleen and her maid break out by chipping through the mortar and loosening the stones. ‘The sky was blue, and a fresh breeze played on their faces; but how melancholy everything looked all around!’ Her father’s castle lies in ruins and the land is waste and desolate. Hungry and desperate enough to eat raw nettles, Maid Maleen and her maid wander into another country and find kitchen work in the palace of the king whose son was Maid Maleen’s sweetheart. His father has chosen for him another bride ‘as ugly as her heart was wicked.’ Unwilling to show her face in public, the bullying bride forces Maid Maleen to dress in her wedding clothes and veil and impersonate her. The prince is astonished by Maid Maleen’s likeness to his lost love, but cannot believe it is she: ‘She has long been shut up in the tower, or dead.’

On the way to church Maid Maleen sees a nettle growing up between the stones, and speaks to it. ‘Oh nettle plant,’ she murmurs, 

            ‘…little nettle plant,

            What dost thou here alone?

            I have known the time

            When I ate thee unboiled,

            When I ate thee unroasted.’

‘What are you saying?’ asks the king’s son. ‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘I was only thinking of Maid Maleen.’ They cross the foot-bridge into the churchyard. ‘Foot-bridge,’ says Maid Maleen, ‘do not break. I am not the true bride.’ She steps through the church door: ‘Church door, break not. I am not the true bride.’ ‘What are you saying?’ asks the prince. ‘Ah,’ she answers, ‘I was only thinking of Maid Maleen.’ The prince hangs a precious chain around Maid Maleen’s neck. They are married, but on the way home she does not speak to him, and arriving at the palace she ‘put off the magnificent clothes and the jewels, dressed herself in her grey gown, and kept nothing but the jewel on her neck which she had received from the bridegroom.’

Now suspicious, on the wedding night the prince tests the ‘wicked’ bride by asking her to repeat what she said to the nettle on the way to church. The bride has to run and ask Maid Maleen for the answer, and the prince tests her further, asking what she said to the foot-bridge and what she said to the church door. Each time the bride has to ask Maid Maleen, till finally the prince asks to be shown the jewel he placed around her neck. Now the bride admits the imposture. She sends her servants to have Maid Maleen’s head struck off, but Maid Maleen screams for help and the king’s son rushes to her aid. Is it possible? Can this girl really be Maid Maleen, his lost true love…? 

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. Like Maid Maleen, 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), while the men in her life can only ‘weep and mourn’, a princess trapped in a glass mountain ultimately tricks her captor and engineers her own escape. More similar to Maid Maleen is a Danish tale, The Girl Clad in Mouse-Skin[2], in which the heroine digs her way out of an earthen mound. These tales are categorised 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:

In the Motif Index, practically all female pursuits are identified as “Search” and male pursuits as “Quest” … The naming of the type of tales to which the Norwegian “The Finn King’s Daughter” belongs provides another way of ignoring a heroine’s more adventurous qualities. ...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.[3]

Besides, stories know nothing of categories: they transgress boundaries, blend into one another and hang like cloudy tapestries in our minds, full of half-remembered patterns. In Maid Maleen and The Girl Clad in Mouse-Skin there are many similarities with another tale type, AT 425: ‘The Search for the Lost Husband’. In stories such as The Black Bull of Norroway or East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon, a heroine sets out in quest of a lost lover. After journeying for seven years, visiting the sun and the moon, climbing glass mountains in iron shoes and so forth, she usually arrives to find him on the point of marrying a troll or someone equally ugly and unworthy. Bribing the false bride with gifts gained on her journey – golden and silver gowns, golden spindles, a golden hen with golden chicks, etc – the heroine wins permission to spend three nights in the prince’s chamber. She sits at his bedside calling for him to wake, reminding him of who she is and what she’s done for him:

Seven lang years I served for thee

The glassy hill I clamb for thee

The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee

And wilt thou no wauken and turn to me?[4]

Drugged by the false bride, the prince sleeps too soundly to hear. By the third night though, having been informed by a servant about the beggar girl who sits by his bedside weeping and singing, the prince is wise or curious enough to throw away the sleeping draught. Hearing the song for himself, he recognises his true love and their long separation is ended: ‘He heard, and turned to her.’

The heroine of The Girl Clad in Mouse-Skin spends seven years under a mound where her father has placed her, not in punishment, but in order to protect her from war. She is provided with light and food, and a little dog for company. When she runs out of food, her little dog kills mice for her: she eats the mice and sews their skins into a cloak, and when no one comes to release her she digs herself out. Covering her gold and silver dresses with the mouse-skin cloak she presents herself at her lover’s house as a poor girl in search of work. Now she discovers that her lover’s new bride-to-be does not wish to marry him, as she herself has another sweetheart. The two young women co-operate and the heroine takes the bride’s place at the wedding. Slipping away, she hides in her mouse-skin cloak again, only to throw it off and reveal herself dramatically at the wedding dance:

[She] stood clad in her beautiful gold embroidery, and was more lovely to look at than the other bride …Her sorrow was now turned to joy, and as she wished everyone to be as happy as herself, she bestowed land and money on the other bride, that she might marry the man of her choice, to whom she had given her heart. …And now the marriage-feast was gay, when the young lord danced with his true bride, to whom he had been wedded in the church, and given the ring. 

The constant thing in most of these stories is that the bridegroom forgets what has passed between them but the bride doesn’t. Once they are separated, the bridegroom is passive, the heroine active. Throughout her troubles she knows who she is: true lover and true bride, and this conviction and sense of destiny sustains and motivates her journey. 

Maid Maleen is different.

A vein of deep seriousness runs through it from the very beginning. Maid Maleen provides no extenuating motive for the king’s incarceration of his daughter, such as to keep her safe from war. Indeed, there is a suggestive shadow of those tales in which the father feels an incestuous longing for his daughter. In Müllenhoff’s verson, the king has no alternative bridegroom planned, and so no reasonable excuse for objecting to her choice: in creating the extra suitor, the Grimms may have been trying to make the king’s motives appear a little less sinister. At any rate by constructing a dark tower in which to shut her up, Maid Maleen’s father certainly exercises abusive if not Freudian control. Both Müllenhoff and the Grimms emphasise the shocking, claustrophobic isolation of the princess and her maid, sitting in total darkness, ‘cut off from the sky and the earth,’ unable to hear any sound from outside. Passive? Yes, but I think there is psychological realism in the patience with which Maid Maleen and her maid sit out the seven years. Imprisonment deprives them of agency. They cling to the belief that though the sentence is unjust, it is at least finite. They believe they will not be forgotten, that if they wait, in the end someone will come to let them out. But they have been forgotten: by the king, by the lover, by everyone. 

The time passed by, and by the decline of food and drink they knew that the seven years were coming to an end. They thought the moment of their deliverance was come; but no stroke of the hammer was heard, no stone fell out of the wall.

All that prisoner-passivity and patience turns out to have been useless. The two women now seek actively to escape. They could have done so at any time before, but the weight of the king’s sentence, and their belief in it, lay upon them. Here Müllenhoff, emphasing the girls’ self-reliance, writes, ‘So they had to help themselves.’ (‘So mussten sie sich denn selber helfen.’) In the Grimms’ version Maid Maleen takes charge of their destiny but her words hint at the desperation she feels: ‘Maid Maleen said, “We must try our last chance, and see if we can break through the wall.”’ (‘Da sprach die Jungfrau Maleen: “Wir müssen das letzte versuchen und sehen, ob wir die Mauer dürchbrechen.”) Taking turns with a bread knife Maid Maleen and her maid scrape away the mortar between the stones and after three days of ‘great labour’ they push out a block and break through. Light rushes in. At last they can see the sky and breathe fresh air, but a new shock awaits:

Her father’s castle lay in ruins, the town and villages were, so far as could be seen, destroyed by fire, the fields far and wide laid to waste, and no human being was visible.

At this point Müllenhof repeats the purposeful phrase, ‘So they had to help themselves.’ In the Grimms’ tale the crushing effect of the discovery is conveyed by a rhetorical question, ‘But where were they to go?’ (‘Aber wo wollten sie sich hinwenden?’) During their imprisonment the world has changed. Huge events have taken place, of which they in their isolation were completely unaware. How is a prisoner to adjust, adapt? New-born into this empty, post-apocalyptic land, their hard-won freedom brings no joy. They can only wander, starving, living on handfuls of nettles, till they cross the border into a country ruled by that very King whose son was Maid Maleen’s lover. And he is about to marry another woman.

At this point in other ‘lost bridegroom’ tales there is a sense of great purpose: the girl’s arrival at the place where her lover resides is the pinnacle of her journey, and she is full of determination to win him back. By contrast Maid Maleen’s wanderings have been aimless. She’s not aspiring to find and marry her sweetheart,  she’s simply trying to survive. Even when she finds work as a kitchenmaid in the palace and is employed in carrying meals to the chamber of the royal-bride-to-be, she seems stunned, passive, futureless. When forced under threat of death to impersonate the false bride, she suffers it as another indignity rather than seizing the opportunity to reveal herself to the prince. Nothing could be further from the confident resolve of the heroine of The Black Bull of Norroway, or the mutually beneficial alliance of the two brides in The Girl Clad in Mouse-Skin. Significantly at this point, as if to emphasise Maid Maleen’s degradation, her own maid disappears from the story. Maid Maleen is the servant now. And so on her way to the church, dressed as the princess she used to be and holding her true love’s hand, Maid Maleen sees a nettle growing by the wayside and it triggers a crisis. I once ate nettles raw. Can I really be Maid Maleen? Who am I? 

‘Do you know Maid Maleen?’ the prince asks eagerly as she murmurs the name. And she denies it. ‘No, how should I know her? I have only heard of her.’ 

Is she testing him? Is this a secret reproach? I don’t think so. Maid Maleen has been a princess, a prisoner and a beggar. Her father forgot her. Her lover forgot her. The world forgot her. Now she is a kitchen-maid impersonating a princess, a pretender and cheat. ‘I am not the true bride,’ she repeats, afraid that the honest world will reject her, the foot-bridge break under her step, the church door split as she passes through. ‘I am not the true bride.’ 

In no other story I know of does this rejection of self occur.  

Maid Maleen is the true bride, but dispossessed, traumatised, damaged. There is a poignancy in her behaviour which I find deeply moving. The world has broken under her and she cannot trust it, cannot trust herself. Her loss of identity is such that she will do nothing to reinstate herself, will not speak another word. It is up to the prince to put the false bride to the test as, unable to answer his questions, she tacitly admits her deceit:

            I must go out unto my maid

            Who keeps my thoughts for me.

Should we feel sorry for the ugly bride? That would be a very modern reaction. Fairy tales operate by particular rules. Youthful beauty almost always signifies goodness, ugliness its opposite: what you see is what you get. Nevertheless Heather Robbins, to whom I owe the translation of Jungfer Maleen, has made the interesting point that unlike, say, the troll bride of The Black Bull of Norroway, this particular false bride knows she is ugly, and that when she repeats Maid Maleen’s words to the prince, she is being forced to utter the truth about herself: ‘I am not the true bride’. Is it an elaborate trap? Can Maid Maleen be deliberately tricking her?  

            In another tale she might. It’s a ruse I can imagine Tatterhood or the Mastermaid, or any number of other ingenious heroines might employ. It could even be true of Müllenhoff’s tale, but the Grimms’ story just doesn’t feel like that – at least to me. In The Girl Clad in Mouse-Skin, the mirror-opposite situation of the two brides works to their advantage. In Maid Maleen, the heroine and the false bride mirror one so another so strikingly in their low self-esteem, that on a psychological level the ugly false bride may even be Maid Maleen. In a powerful painting, False Bride Maleen, Edouard Manet makes manifest the darkness of the fairytale: the black fan guarding the face, the black dress, colour of death, the secrecy.

The truth comes out. The prince wishes to see the mysterious maidservant. In a final effort the false bride sends her servants to kill Maid Maleen. This shock of sudden physical danger at last provokes a reaction: Maid Maleen screams so loudly that the prince rushes to her aid. Here the Grimms’ telling of the tale diverges significantly from that of Müllenhoff, in whose version the prince’s eyes are opened ‘and he saw that she was no other than his former beautiful true bride that he had quite forgotten, that Maid Maleen was the same woman she herself had spoken about on the way to church.’  (‘…und er sah, dass sie auch keine andre sei als seine ehemalige Braut, die er ganz vergessen hatte, das die Jungfer Maleen selber sei, von er sie immer auf dem Kirchwege gesprochen’). With that, the story ends. Without more ado the prince orders Maid Maleen to be taken to a fine room, and the false bride’s head to be struck off. The patriarchy disposes. Maid Maleen herself says nothing.

The Grimms do a lot more with this. First, before he actually recognises her, the prince acknowledges Maid Maleen as ‘the true bride who went with me to the church,’ confirming her as someone of great importance to him whoever she is. Only after that does he tentatively explore further: ‘On the way to the church you did name Maid Maleen, who was my betrothed bride; if I could believe it possible, I should think she was standing before me – you are like her in every respect.’ 

‘You are like her in every respect.’ Following this proclamation of her worth, Maid Maleen finds her voice. Now she herself speaks out: at last comes the ‘seven long years I served for thee’ moment, the moment when, by restating her experiences, she reclaims her identity, a moment more poignant for the real suffering which has preceded it. There has been no assistance for this girl from the sun, moon and stars, no golden and silver dresses or magical gifts to barter with. No magic at all.

‘I am Maid Maleen, who for your sake was imprisoned seven years in the darkness, who suffered hunger and thirst, and has lived so long in want and poverty. Today, however, the sun is shining on me once more. I was married to you in the church, and I am your lawful wife.’ 

This fairy tale is a remarkable account of psychological trauma inflicted by suffering, all the more effective because of the other narratives with which it can be compared. There are many fairy tales in which a girl sets out to find a lost lover, but though her quest may be arduous she is always confident of her identity and what she is trying to achieve. When Maid Maleen escapes from her tower however, the empty landscape through which she wanders is her internal landscape, a waste land devoid of sustenance. There is nothing familiar in it, no one left who knows her, and she no longer knows herself. Physical survival is not enough. Unlike the heroines of other ‘lost bridegroom’ tales she is too unsure of herself to claim her lover and her place at his side.‘I am not the true bride.’ Not until at some deep level the prince recognises her does she recover her voice and, in telling her story, claiming her experiences and linking them together, reaffirms her identity and emerges from darkness. ‘Today the sun is shining on me once more.’ 

There can be little more to say. In true fairy-tale fashion the lovers live happily for the rest of their lives and the false bride has her head struck off. The story ends with a nursery rhyme which Müllenhoff places at the end of Jungfer Maleen – not as part of the tale, but as an interesting note or cross-reference. The Grimms, however, build the rhyme into the narrative so that it becomes a wonderfully evocative coda, distancing and mythologising Maid Maleen as she disappears from memory into children’s rhymes and games:

The tower in which Maid Maleen had been imprisoned remained standing for a long time, and when the children passed it by they sang,

“Kling, klang, gloria

Who sits within this tower?

A King’s daughter, she sits within,

A sight of her I cannot win.

The wall it will not break,

The stone it cannot be pierced.

Little Hans with your coat so gay,

Follow me, follow me, fast as you may.’

It’s a curiously light-hearted ending to a dark and profound tale. Preceded by a peal of bells, Maid Maleen's suffering and imprisonment vanish into a children’s circle dance. I am reminded of the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida when, after death, Troilus’s ‘light ghost’ ascends into the heavens and looks back at the ‘little spot of earth’ where he loved, fought and suffered, and where everything seemed to matter so much – and laughs. 

Perhaps, the wise fairy tale suggests to us, in the end, all mortal things fade so?

  

---

[1] Throughout this essay I am indebted to Heather Robbins for kindly making available to me her unpublished translation of Karl Müllenhoff’s ‘Jungfer Maleen’.

[2] Benjamin Thorpe, ‘The Girl Clad in a Mouse-Skin’, Yule Tide Stories, 1888

[3] Torborg Lundell: ‘Gender-Related Biases in the Aarne-Thompson Indexes’, Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm, 1986, ed. Ruth Bottigheimer

[4] Robert Chambers, ‘The Black Bull of Norroway’, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1870

Picture Credits:

Maid Maleen by Arthur Rackham

Jungfrau Maleen by R. Leinweber, 1912

False Bride Maleen by Edouard Manet via the website Wonderlit (I have been unable otherwise to source this)
Irish Tower, Arthur Rackham

THE BREMEN TOWN MUSICIANS

by Leslie Wilson

When my novel Last Train from Kummersdorf  was published, my brother read it and then said to me: ‘It’s not at all a realistic novel, is it?’ And indeed, it isn’t, though I’m not sure how many people have noticed.

It is a novel very much in the German tradition: and at first glance it is close to other German novels and short stories about the Second World War and ‘Die Flucht’ – which means ‘The Flight’, meaning the escape from the advancing Russian army. Most of these are realist. But as I wrote it I knew I was in the German romantic/gothic tradition, like Storm’s Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse), or Gotthelf’s The Black Spider. Less unequivocally so, perhaps, than Grass’s Tin Drum. (A novel which made it hard, at first, to write Kummersdorf, because Grass seemed to have said it all so brilliantly.) But then I began to see that I had things to say that hadn’t already been said, and dared to go forward.

That tradition is deeply rooted in folklore, and so am I. Like Susan Price, I spent years and years of my childhood reading folktales from all over the world. But it was when I was doing my degree in German that I read the whole way through the three-volume 1900 jubilee edition of Grimm that I was lucky enough to be given in childhood – and, like Susan Price, found my mind going clicketty-clack, categorising the stories, seeing that certain basic plots came up over and over again, with variations – and once a motif from the Nibelungenlied, the medieval Lay of the Nibelungs, in The Two Brothers: the sword put between a man masquerading as his twin brother and his sister-in-law when they have to sleep together. Siegfried puts a sword between himself and Brünhilde when he beds her in the guise of his brother-in-law-to be, Gunther. Maybe the Nibelungenlied draws from popular folklore, maybe the folk story has picked up part of the epic. In any case, it was deeply important to me to read the collection then, one of those things that one knows one has to do, even if one doesn’t know why. What it taught me is what others have said before me: there are only a limited amount of plots. The other realisation was also important: that stories are interdependent and feed each other. When – many years later - I started to write Kummersdorf, I quickly realised the influence, in my story, of The Bremen Town Musicians. 

 

The Brothers Grimm were undoubtedly motivated by a desire to establish an authentic ‘German’ voice; a project rooted in the dubious one of German unification by force, rather than through the liberal impulse of revolution. That hope was dashed in 1948. As for the ‘authentic German voice’, that was a stupid idea. Folktales are international; carried along trade routes, they flit from country to country. Some of the Grimm stories came from Perrault. Maybe nursemaids picked them up in the houses of the francophile German aristocracy and middle class, and took them back into their own humble homes to tell to their own children. At that point other motifs infiltrated them, which is why Aschenputtel is different from Cendrillon. The other thing that the Grimm brothers did was to edit the stories – but I am quite certain that they still retain much of the authentic vernacular voice. 

I think the value of myth and fairy stories is that they mitigate the dreadful things that happen to human beings. Stories of heroes, of magical rescues, of the world turned upside down, give us courage to face a harsh world. The savagery of the revenge sometimes taken expresses people’s deep inner anger; an anger too often bitten back in a world where injustice and callous exploitation were – and still are - rife.  The Bremen Town Musicians is about old animals, worked-out, threatened with various brutal ends because they’re no use to their masters any longer. They find a robbers’ house in the forest and frighten the robbers away from it and their booty simply by making their various noises – music, according to them – so then they are able to live at their ease for the rest of their lives. I think the story reflects the reality of the lives of story-telling grandparents, who were similarly regarded as useless – except to keep the children quiet. It’s a story about Grey Power. Or just about the powerless who manage – just for once – to turn the tables. And, significantly, when the robber comes back to see if the band can repossess their house, the voice that finally terrorises him is that of the cockerel who he interprets as a judge’s voice, calling out: ‘Bring the rogue to me!’

Last Train from Kummersdorf is about civilians, and civilians who end up facing the incoming army. As a child, I always noticed the value that’s placed in wartime on soldiers’ lives over those of civilians. I resented it, because from an early age I’d heard from my mother just what defeat means. When the soldiers are dead, it’s the old people, the youngsters and children who are in the front line. Many of the Russian soldiers entering Germany in 1945 behaved the way conquering soldiers have always done. They behaved that way even in the Slav countries they came to first, so it wasn’t, as many people have said, just a revenge-taking for the dreadful things the German soldiers had done in Russia. Members of the Red Army raped, tortured, murdered and looted, with Stalin’s blessing. The innocent suffered along with the guilty. ‘Deutsche Frau ist deutsche Frau,’ a Russian soldier said when it was pointed out to him that the woman he was about to rape was Jewish. ‘German woman is German woman.’ My mother got away from a Russian by the skin of her teeth, ran away into the forest and the mountains and almost died there. That, along with the expulsion of many of her family from their homes in Silesia, is the ‘core narrative’ I was working with.

If you sleep rough, it very quickly starts to do things to your perception of reality: dossers and refugees live a different kind of reality from ours, in our houses, where we can shut the door on danger. I think when you’re in constant danger of your life, then some fundamental, mythic perceptions probably kick in. My mother, wandering the mountains in April, was living out a fundamental folkloric story of pursuit, only it was Russian soldiers, rather than enraged witches, she was escaping from. Hanno and Effi, in Kummersdorf,  are trying to escape from the Russians too, but they have a Quest, too: to get to the West, where the boy Hanno’s mother is, and where the girl Effi is firmly convinced she’ll find her father. The teenagers pick up other people, rag-tag refugees; it was at that point that I said to myself: ‘This story is like The Bremen Town Musicians!’

 

But my refugees don’t find the baddies in a house: the baddies are on the run, too, and the kids pick some of them up and have to schlepp them along willy-nilly; the old crazy doctor who’s murdered disabled children in the ‘euthanasia’ programme; the rabid Nazi police officer who nurses a strange hatred for the boy Hanno. But there’s someone else: the little man Sperling (which means sparrow) with his dog Cornelius and his magic cart which he makes over to the kids after a Russian air attack kills him. When the kids play a game with the railway tickets in the cart, when Effi teases the adults with the fantasy they’ve cooked up – when suddenly the other refugees start believing the alluring fantasy of a train that can carry them out of danger – this is story taking people over, altering their perceptions of reality. And the train itself, when it half-magically appears, becomes a location where the truth comes out about the refugees’ pasts. Though it’s no means of escape for them, so the story doesn’t end there.

My novel, like so many fairy-tales, and especially the Musicians, takes place in the German ‘Wald’, the forest, the location where so many German folk tales play off. I knew the German forest from an early age, though not the Brandenburg forest of the novel. My grandfather had a house on the eastern shore of the Rhine. My brother and I used to go off into the Wald­ and explore it, but it felt dangerous; full of wild boar for one thing, who might attack us in the breeding season. Once, when I was a baby, my mother was on her own in the house at night – my grandparents had gone out together – and she heard a snuffling and thumping against the door, a huge animal apparently trying to break in. She was terrified. In the morning, there was blood on the grass outside, and the adults realised it must have been a wounded boar. It wasn’t really a danger to us, of course, but the story of that inchoate menace in the night coming out of the Wald  stayed with me. When the stags were rutting, the clash of their antlers echoed and filled the valley in front of the house; they were almost as loud as thunderclaps.

The road from Opa’s house led to a little clearing in the woods where a flame flickered, day and night. I was told that a child had been lost out there once, and its desperate mother promised the Virgin Mary that if her child was found, she’d set a flame there to burn to help other travellers who might be lost. The flame marked the place where the child was safely found. I don’t know if it’s still there. I can picture it now, at a place where two paths met, in a part of the forest planted with conifers; the dusty path scattered with needle-mess and resinous cones, and the dimness among the trees. Mirkwood. The forest went on and on, it seemed enormous. I knew the witches and wolves and robbers were in there; you only had to go far enough. And so it became part of my psyche and so I had to write about it.

Leslie Wilson grew up bilingual, the daughter of a German mother and an English father, and some of the events in her first YA book, ‘Last Train from Kummersdorf’ stem from her mother’s traumatic wartime experiences, from which, in part, her writing derives its emotional truth.  Shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, the novel is set in 1945. On the run from the advancing Russian army, two young people, Effi and Hanno, become companions on the road, teaming up to defend and help each other from the many dangers they meet along the way. 

Leslie is additionally the author of two novels for adults: 'Malefice', a novel of the English witchhunt, published in 1991, and 'The Mountain of Immoderate Desires', which won the Southern Arts Prize in 1997.  Her most recent young adult novel, 'Saving Rafael' (2009) was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Lancashire and the Southern Schools book awards. ‘Saving Rafael’ opens grimly in ‘Uckermark Girls’ Concentration Camp, Spring 1944’, where the heroine, Jenny, has been sent. She herself is not Jewish, but she’s in love with her long-term best friend Rafael, who is – and the book heartbreakingly and nail-bitingly describes her and her family’s increasingly desperate and forlorn attempt to protect their old friends and neighbours. I asked Leslie if she could see any fairytale motifs in this book too, and she answered that maybe it is a bit like the stories of girls who undergo hideous sufferings to save their enchanted lovers or husbands – like ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’. 

Illustrations:

The Bremen Town Musicians: black and white illustration from book of Grimm's fairytales in Leslie Wilson's possession.  Watercolour illustration by Ruth Koser-Michaels, from 'Marchen der Bruder Grimm' 1937, Droemer Knaur, in Katherine Langrish's possession.

[The translation of the German gothic script in the illustration is: "into the room, so that the windowpanes rattled.  The robbers leapt up at the ghastly racket, and were convinced that a ghost was coming in: terrified, they ran out of the house into the forest.  Now the four companions sat down at the table, helped themselves to what was left of the feast, and ate as if they were getting ready for a four weeks fast. When the four musicians had finished, the extinguished the light..."] 

"Jorinda and Joringel" - a new Fairytale Reflection

 

I was reminded by Celia Rees’s post on Blodeuedd, the girl who was changed into an owl, of this haunting fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm, which I first read many, many years ago. It’s stayed with me ever since. It isn’t well known – perhaps because although it’s strong on emotional intensity, it’s short on plot. But first, here’s the story.

It tells of a castle in the middle of a dark and thick forest, inhabited by a single old woman who turns herself into the shape of a cat or screech-owl by day, assuming her own form only at night. She lures wild birds and beast to her, and kills and eats them.

If anyone came within one hundred paces of the castle he was obliged to stand still and could not stir from the spot until she bade him be free. But whenever an innocent maiden came within this circle, she changed her into a bird and shut her up in a wickerwork cage, and carried the cage into a room in the castle. She had about seven thousand cages of rare birds in the castle.”

A young maiden called Jorinda is betrothed to a youth called Joringel, and in order to be alone together, the pair of them take a walk into the forest. Joringel warns Jorinda to take care: they must not stray too near the castle.

It was a beautiful evening. The sun shone brightly between the trunks of the trees into the dark green of the forest, and the turtledoves sang mournfully upon the beech trees,

but for some reason the young lovers – for whom everything should be wonderful - are sorrowful.

Jorinda wept now and then: she sat down in the sunshine and was sorrowful. Joringel was sorrowful too; they were as sad as though they were about to die. Then they looked around them, and were quite at a loss, for they did not know which way they should go home. The sun was still half above the mountain and half under.


Joringel looked through the bushes, and saw the old walls of the castle close at hand.
He was horror-stricken and full of deadly fear. Jorinda was singing:

“My little bird with the necklace red
Sings sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
“He sings that the little dove must soon be dead.
Sings sorrow, sor- jug, jug, jug.”


For the sun has set, Jorinda has been changed into a nightingale, and “A screech owl with glowing eyes flew three times about her and three times cried ‘to-whoo, to-whoo, to-whoo!’”

Frozen to the spot and unable to speak or move, Joringel sees the owl fly into a thicket and immediately afterwards a crooked old woman ‘with large red eyes’ emerges, catches the nightingale and takes it away. She returns later and releases Joringel with the strange words, ‘If the moon shines on the cage, Zachiel, let him loose,’ but she refuses to release Jorinda, saying Joringel will never see her again.

Joringel does finally manage to release Jorinda with the aid of a magical blood-red flower containing a dew-drop as big as a pearl, with which he touches the doors of the castle and the cage itself and sets Jorinda and all the other maidens free; the sexual imagery is clear enough, and the happy ending is satisfactory if perfunctory; what is really memorable is the sorrowful beauty of the forest, the sadness of the lovers, the imagery of the birds, and the strange song Jorinda sings.

What’s it all about? Not always a useful question. A fairytale should be read like a poem, or attended to in the same kind of way as we attend to music, allowing it to work directly on the emotions. For me, this tale strikes strange chords from the heartstrings. I might hazard a guess that the lovers are sad because they know they’ll grow old and die, that evening is here and the day nearly over, because their young love may not last and the sun is already half beneath the mountain. Perhaps they’re afraid of mortality, the grave, symbolised by the grim stone walls of the castle whose shadow immobilises them, and the old owl-woman whose voice is a lament.

Years ago in my early twenties I was walking through London with a girl friend. We were laughing and chattering, and a middle-aged woman passing by – she may have been elderly, but I think she was only middle-aged – leaned over and said in a low voice but with extraordinary venom, “One day you’ll be like me.” As a memento mori, it was quite something, and my friend shuddered, but we agreed later that we never would be like her. We would never, ever be that bitter.

Nevertheless, everyone recognises the fear and dread associated with thoughts of old age and death, and the loss of youth and beauty; and happy are those of us who can throw it off with no more than a brief shiver. For me this fairytale takes those dark emotions and transmutes them into something beautiful.



Picture credit: Arthur Rackham, Jorinda and Joringel

The Fisherman and His Wife

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.