As a writer, Susan has nerves of steel. Her work is beautiful but tough, and she’s not particularly interested in happy endings. She has the terse, dry wit of the Icelandic sagas which she loves, and a sharp eye. No one is better than Sue at bringing strange characters and faraway worlds to life. In this passage (from 'Ghost Song') Malyuta, a rough peasant, gazes at his new born son:
He looked at his son’s little body, no longer from head to foot than his own forearm. And the baby’s small mouth and nose, that breathed for him just as well as Malyuta’s great gape and hooter. …His tiny hands and – smaller and smaller – his tiny fingers, each with a tiny, perfect nail. And this smallness would grow to Malyuta’s size!
Now I believe what they say in the churches, thought Malyuta. I believe that water was turned into wine, and that three loaves and five fishes fed ten thousand. If a wonder like this boy of mine can come from two plain folk like my wife and me, then I believe that miracles are true.
It's a wonderful mixture of earthy scepticism and amazed love. And poring over his child like this gives Malyuta the strength he will need in the next few moments when a shaman-witch from the icy north enters the house to take the baby away.
Susan has been interested in myths and folklore since she was nine, and became a professional writer when she was sixteen – and much of her writing is based on, or informed by, folklore. Here she talks about her love of legends and fairy tales, and of one in particular, collected by Joseph Jacobs in his 'Celtic Fairytales'. (Click on the title near the bottom of this post and you can read it.)
SILVERTREE AND GOLDENTREE
As a child, I heard the usual
fairy-stories – a 'Cinderella' derived from Perrault, 'Billy
Goats Gruff', 'Little Red Riding Hood', and so on. I
loved them. I loved their repetitions and rhythms– 'Oh,
Grandmama, what big ears you have!”, and “Who's trit-trotting
across MY bridge? - ' I loved their vivid, beautiful images –
the little girl in the scarlet, hooded cloak walking through the dark forest,
the glass slipper, the sky-high beanstalk... But I had no idea of their
history, or their cultural resonance. I imagined that the version of the
story that was read to me WAS the story, that there was no other way of telling
it.
At the age of 10, the Greek Myths happened to me, and I was totally
smitten. For a whole year I lived, in my imagination, in the Greek Myths,
with flying horses and hydras, with awesome and unpredictable gods, dragons and
golden apples. The next year, when I moved to Secondary School, I
discovered the Norse Myths – and they, for me, blew the Greek Myths away.
They felt like coming home: but a home that was no less fascinating, with ice
giants, fire giants – in fact, ice and fire all the way through.
After that, I read every collection of Myths and Legends I could find; and when
I ran out of Myths, I read collections of fairy-stories and folktales:
the Grimm Brothers, and Jacob's English Fairy Stories, and Asbjornsen and Moe's
Norwegian Stories – and Russian, Irish, Scottish, French, Italian, Polish
stories – I couldn't get enough of them. And, without knowing it, I was
learning an enormous amount about story-telling – 'Billy Goats Gruff',
for instance, is a master-class in narrative and suspense.
The more I read, the more something became obvious: – the stories weren't as
individual, as distinct from each other – or from Myth – as I'd thought.
The Scots story of Kate Crackernuts was strangely like
Cinderella, though set in a more work-a-day world. Another Scots
story, 'The Finger-lock' was Cinderella with a boy as the
central character instead of a girl. No Fairy-Godmother – no pumpkin
coach or glass slipper, but the essentials of the story remained. (There
are, I later learned, over three hundred variations on the story usually known
as 'Cinderella'.)
This Norwegian story, 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was
the myth of Psyche and Cupid in northern dress. The English
stories, 'Tom-Tit-Tot,' and 'Stormy Weather' were
variations of 'Rumpelstiltskin'. In 'Whuppity-Stoorie' the
Rumpelstiltskin figure is female, and kindly – she saves the heroine from a
life of drudgery in the end.
Echoes were everywhere. In the Irish Legend of Deirdre, the heroine
sees a calf killed in winter. Its red blood falls into the white snow,
and a raven comes to eat it. Deirdre wishes for a husband, “with skin as
white as this snow, lips and cheeks as red as this blood, and hair as black as
the raven.” In 'Snow White,' collected hundreds of years later,
the queen sits stitching her embroidery in its ebony frame beside a snowy
window-ledge. She pricks her finger, and blood falls on the snow.
She wishes for a child, “with skin as white as this snow, hair as black as this
ebony, and lips and cheeks as red as this blood.”
In the story, 'The Soldier At Heaven's Gate,' a soldier slips into
Heaven before his time, and climbs up into God's chair, from where he sees the
whole world, and everything that's happening, just as God does. The
soldier is overwhelmed by the world's sorrow, cruelty and pain: and the end of
the story is tragic. I was reminded of how the god Frey, in Norse Myth,
climbs into Odin's chair, and sees all of the nine worlds spread before him.
He looks into Jotunheim, sees a beautiful giantess, and falls deeply in
love... The consequences are also tragic, but on a more mythic scale,
since this leads, in part, to the defeat of the gods at End of the World.
The 'Three Heads In The Well' is another fairy-tale with
mythic echoes. The well is under a great tree, and from the well's depths
float up three wise heads, which speak to the heroine. In Norse Myth,
there is a well between the roots of the great World Tree, and by the side of
the well is the head of Mirmir, which has wise words for those who question
it. And Celtic Myth is full of magical, talking severed heads.
Nor are these connections limited to folk-lore and myth. The Danish
legend of Amleth is Shakespeare's Hamlet;
and King Lear is, in part, a Cinderella story.
I was puzzled by all these echoes and correspondences, in stories which were
supposed to be widely separated geographically, and dated from a time before
broadcasting and widespread literacy could send a story round the world in
days, if not hours. That led me to reading books about folk-lore,
rather than books of folk-lore. I learned that, of
course, I wasn't the first to notice that fairy-stories seem to be made up of
interchangeable, interlocking pieces, which can be taken apart and put back
together in different patterns. The pieces have been given the name of
'motifs', and have been catalogued – 'The Forbidden Door', 'The Helpful
Animal', 'The Cruel Stepmother', and so on. I was also fascinated to
discover that the psychoanalyst, Jung, considered some of these motifs to be
archetypes: an integral part of our psychology. The trackless forest, the
wolves and 'the white bear of England's wood'; the depths of the well, the
sorcerer – these appear in our dreams and shape our thinking. The ogres
and dragons and man-eating witches of fairy-tales have a reality: small
children know there is a monster lurking in the dark, waiting
to eat them. Outside the cave, there was. One of the 'uses of
fairy-tales' is in helping children to sleep. Telling them, 'Monsters
don't exist,' won't help – they know it isn't true. Giving them a
dragon-slayer is far more effective. These days, 'Dr Who' works a treat.
However that may be, I have found fairy-stories endlessly compelling throughout
my life. Indeed, I think I find them more compelling, now I'm in my fifties,
than I did when I was five. Then they were a good yarn. Now I find that,
like the dark well at the foot of the World Tree, they hold fathoms deep of a
not always kindly wisdom.
I can't pinpoint exactly when I started to notice these strangely haunting
echoes and connections between tales, but I know that one of the stories I read
around that time was the Irish SILVERTREE AND GOLDENTREE, and so that's the
story I nominate for this series. I leave it to the reader to guess which
better known fairy-story it echoes, but I will mention this: in Irish myth, a
salmon lives in a pool in the Boyne, and eats the hazelnuts which fall
into the water. Hazels were magical trees, and the magical nuts made the
salmon wise. The young Fionn Mac Cumhaill was ordered by his master to
catch the salmon, cook it and serve it to him. As Fionn cooked it, he
burned his thumb, stuck it in his mouth, and so tasted the salmon's flesh
first, and gained all its wisdom, including the ability to understand birds and
animals – just as Siegfried, in Norse legend, cooked the dragon's heart for his
master, burned his thumb, stuck it in his mouth, and understood what the birds
in the tree overhead were saying...
