Fairytale Reflections: DER BÄRENHÄUTER/THE BEARSKIN

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

A combination of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Cinderella’’, with an equal part of “The Cat-Skin’’ and a good dose of Job, “The Bearskin” (Der Bärenhäuter in the original German) is a tale of one man testing his endurance against the Devil’s. Some versions of the story, such as the one told in the Philippines, don’t necessarily pronounce a winner in this contest. But the original Grimm’s fable makes it abundantly clear: the Devil triumphs again. At times the story has been known as “The Devil, a Bearskin” (Der Teufel ein Bärenhäuter) as if to reinforce this idea. The Bearskin, a starving young man who makes his deal with the Devil so he might survive, undergoes a transformation, but he is no Cinderella, and no friendly and misunderstood Beast either. But this story, I have come to understand, still has had its own impact on the culture, or at least on mass entertainment.

In traditional tellings of “The Bearskin,” a soldier without a war to fight has no food, money, or shelter, and no prospects of finding any; his brothers have rejected him. He appears to be close to suicide when a cloven-hoofed creature in a green jacket reveals himself, and offers a way out. The green jacket will produce all the money he needs if the soldier does not say the Lord’s Prayer; if he does not wash, cut his hair, or clip his nails—if he becomes a monster by sleeping, eating, and living in a bearskin the Devil has just harvested from a bear that threatened to kill the both of them, moments earlier. If the soldier can live as the Bearskin for seven years, he’ll be returned to his natural state again.  

 Without any options, the soldier says yes. He wanders about the country, paying poor people to pray for him; and his transformation from man to monster is gradual. Eventually, though, he is forced to retreat to a room at an inn because his appearance is so appalling. While at the inn, he hears a man in great distress, and discovers the man has lost his fortune. He offers to help the man by giving him money; to thank him, the man promises Bearskin one of his three daughters in marriage. The two older daughters refuse Bearskin, but the youngest agrees because Bearskin has helped her father. Bearskin breaks a ring in two, gives half to this daughter, and keeps the other half. Then he leaves to complete his odyssey.  

After serving his seven years, the Bearskin summons the Devil and demands that he be cleaned up; in some versions, he forces the Devil to say the Lord’s Prayer. He then returns to the inn to retrieve his bride but is mistaken for a more desirable colonel; the two older daughters vie for his attentions. But by presenting his half of the ring, he reveals himself to the youngest daughter and declares: “I am your betrothed bridegroom, whom you saw as Bearskin. Through God's grace I have regained my human form and have become clean again." When the older sisters see the two embracing, they are overcome with rage and anger. One sister hangs herself; the other drowns herself in a well.

The Devil arrives at the home of the new bride and groom that evening. "You see, I now have two souls for the one of yours,’’ he says, referring to the two sisters’ suicides. And so the tale ends. Maybe.

 I was raised in the 1960s in the United States, so what I knew from fairy tales came in the form of Disney movies, books, and costumes. “The Bearskin” was not suitable for such purposes. Perhaps there was no way for Disney to tidy up its message. I did not encounter “The Bearskin” until graduate school, when I was studying German as part of my English degree. “Der Bärenhäuter” was one of the short selections in our textbook. This is appropriate, since fairy tales are one way we pass language and all its shadings onto our children, and yet at the same time, I was too old, and possibly too cynical, to buy into its message.  

  

Because the story appeared in a language instruction book, it emphasized the vocabulary we were studying at that time, so my recollection of the story is filled with the many irregular verbs that must have described how uncomfortable the bearskin was for the soldier. I also remember the young man who leases his soul to the Devil not as a soldier but as a profligate who wakes up after a bender to find himself in dire straits, and this is truly his motivating factor. I was so certain that this was the case that I complained to the professor about the Bearskin’s supposed conversion. He was paying people to pray for him, I argued. He didn’t make any essential changes in his own thought or nature. The instructor laughed, as he would many more times with me, because he served as an advisor on other translation projects I worked on, and to which I added far more errors than I ever did with “The Bearskin.”

German is a language I have studied for many years, and both my memory and my initial understanding of “The Bearskin” are tied up in that experience. My grandfather and uncle, with whom I briefly lived while in high school, both spoke German, and the language was their go-to code when they were deciding how to discipline me for some adolescent infraction. I thought if I could learn it, I could figure out what they were saying. I still have no idea what they were planning. That also seems appropriate, considering the Job-like tests they put me through, although they were only Job-like because of my limited perspective.  

  

Now that I have given myself permission to think about the story in English, I can see how ingeniously it was put together, for the Devil and the soldier reverse roles toward the end of the story, when Bearskin demands penance from the Devil. But crime does not pay in fairy tales; it doesn’t pay for Rumplestiltskin, for example, and the new family created in the process of the Bearskin’s rebirth cannot live happily ever after without some sacrifice. This back-and-forth seems to be a reflection of the language that bore this story, with its flexible syntax, but only to a point: the action, or the verb, always has the same position in a sentence. And the Devil always wins. 

Bruno Bettlelheim, in his introduction to The Uses of Enchantment, argues that religious motifs and morals have always been a part of fairy tales; Jack Zipes, in his introduction to Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, blames conservative religious forces for sanitizing fairy tales as early as the 17^th century.  Nevertheless, the warnings of “The Bearskin” are unmistakably grounded in Christianity, given its plot, and it lends a theological interpretation to tales such as “Cinderella.’’ In light of “The Bearskin,’’ Cinderella’s makeover at the hands of the Fairy Godmother is as joyous as an Easter resurrection. Together with “The Cat-Skin,’’ these fairy tales demonstrate the gamut of the possibilities in the rebirthing process: from poor to rich; from rich to poor; maddeningly temporary or rewardingly permanent.  (The story bears, for lack of a better word, other striking similarities to “The Cat-Skin;’’ the retreat into an animal identity for the protagonist, and the contrivance of jewelry, hidden in food or drink, to reverse that identity back to a worthy human one again.)

I am particularly impressed by the religious nature of this tale, given my early education within the wallet of Walt Disney, who did not care to muddy his profit margin with tenants of charity and self-sacrifice. Yet at the same time, “The Bearskin” is deterministic, or fatalistic, in its faith that the Devil can work his way around the most valiant of men. There is no God in this text, or at least not an explicit God who extends a visible and helping hand to one of his flock. The only assistance he has, he finds from other imperfect humans like himself. Man is on his own here. The soldier saves himself, which some might argue makes “The Bearskin” fulfill an essential function of a fairy tale: showing the powerless or marginalized a path to power, or at least one out of the peril they thought they could not escape. 

I have my daughter, a voracious consumer of science fiction and urban fantasy books, television, and movies, to thank for explaining the story’s discomfiting end.   When someone is rescued from Hell, she said, that person has to be replaced by another soul, to maintain the balance between worlds. So of course the Devil, after losing possession of the soldier’s soul, would attempt to replace it—if not improve on his investment.         

For close to two decades I have been turning “The Bearskin” over in my mind, so much so that I have made it the centerpiece of the next modern fairy tale I hope to write. So perhaps this tale is not quite finished, after all. 

Jane Rosenberg LaForge lives and writes in New York City. She is the author of "An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir'' (Jaded Ibis Press 2014); three chapbooks of poetry, and one full-length poetry collection, "With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women" (The Aldrich Press 2012). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous online and print journals, such as THRUSH, Fruita Pulp and The Linnet's Wings; and she has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. More information is available at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com.



Picture credits:

Bearskin - Arthur Rackham
Bearskin - Louis Rhead
Bearskin - John Gruelle

"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

Fairytale Reflections - "Happily Ever After"

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 (31) Candy Gourlay

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

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

Fairytale Reflections (29) Sally Prue

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