Jorinda and Joringel: Owls and Flowers

 

There’s a story in The Mabinogion about a girl who is changed into an owl. The magicians Gwydion and Math ap Mathonwy create her out of flowers for Lleu Llaw Gyffes whose mother has cursed him never to have a human wife. They take ‘the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured the fairest and most beautiful maiden that anyone had ever seen. And they baptised her in the way that they did at that time, and named her Blodeuedd.’ 

Deed done, curse circumvented: Blodeuedd is presented to Lleu. Nobody has asked her what she wants, however, and one day when Lleu is away she meets the handsome young man Gronw Pebr. The two fall in love and plot to murder Lleu so that they can be together. At the moment of his death however, Lleu is transformed into an eagle. Math restores him to his human shape, and Gwydion pursues Blodeuedd and transforms her into an owl:

‘[Y]ou will never dare show your face in daylight for fear of all the birds. And all the birds will be hostile towards you. … You shall not lose your name, however, but shall always be called Blodeuwedd.’ Blodeuwedd is ‘owl’ in today’s language. And for that reason the birds hate the owl: and the owl is still called Blodeuwedd.[1]

Commenting on the tale, Sioned Davies explains that the name ‘changes from Blodeuedd (‘flowers’) to Blodeuwedd (‘flower-face’) to reflect the image of the bird.’[2] The white face of the barn owl does in fact look like two huge white daisies crushed together.

Blodeuedd is a girl made from flowers and turned into an owl. In the Grimms’ fairy tale Jorinda and Joringel[3] a girl is turned into a bird by an owl-woman – and released by the touch of a flower. Here’s what happens: In the middle of a dark forest an ancient castle is inhabited by an old woman who turns into a cat or a night-owl by day, assuming her own form only when evening comes. She lures wild birds and beasts to her, and kills and eats them. Further:

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 betrothed young couple, Jorinda and Joringel, walk into the forest in order to be alone together. Though Joringel warns his sweetheart that they must take care not to stray close to the castle, everything should be wonderful in this glowing sunset wood – ‘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 feel sorrowful – ‘as sad as though they were about to die.’  In this strange mood,

[T]hey 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 filled with 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.”

The sun has set, Jorinda has been changed into a nightingale, and ‘a screech owl with glowing eyes flew three times round about her, and three times cried ‘to-whoo, to-whoo, to-whoo!’’ Unable to speak or move, Joringel sees the owl fly into a thicket and emerge as a crooked old woman ‘with large red eyes’ who catches the nightingale and takes it away.

Later that evening the enchantress returns later and releases Joringel with the cryptic words, ‘Greet you, Zachiel. If the moon shines on the cage, Zachiel, let him loose at once.’ (Zachiel is probably the angel Zakiel mentioned along with Michael, Gabriel and other angels in a spell for ‘binding the tongue’ in the Syriac ‘Book of Protection’, a compendium of charms and incantations dating in manuscript form from the early 1800s though probably much older.) The old woman refuses to release Jorinda and tells Joringel he will never see his sweetheart again. Joringel goes sadly away, but while working as a shepherd in a nearby village he dreams of a blood-red flower containing a dew-drop as big as a pearl, with which he can open the doors of the castle and the cage. After a nine-day search he finds the flower, returns to the castle and sets Jorinda and all the other maidens free.  

The Grimm brothers took this tale almost verbatim from the deeply Romantic semi-fictional autobiography of Johann Heinrich Jung, 'The Life of Heinrich Stilling', published in 1777.  Writing throughout in the third person, Jung tells how one day, out in the forest gathering firewood, the eleven-year-old Heinrich asks his Aunt Marie for a story. ‘“Tell me, aunt, once more,” said Heinrich, “the tale of Joringel and Jorinde.”’ His aunt is happy to oblige and when she has finished, Heinrich sits ‘as if petrified – his eyes fixed and his mouth half-open. “Aunt!” said he, at length, “it is enough to make one afraid in the night!” “Yes,” said she, “I do not tell these tales at night, otherwise I should be afraid myself.”’[4] 

It’s lovely to have this account of the story actually being told, and to see its effect on child and storyteller. It is placed in this context however, because of what happens next. Having ventured deeper into the woods, Heinrich’s grandfather comes back to tell how he saw a bright light between the trees, “just as when the sun rises in the morning.” Led by the light, he has seen a vision of the brilliant castles and gardens of heaven, and meets his daughter Dora, Heinrich’s dead mother, who tells him he will soon join her in “our eternal habitation.” Thus, the dark forest, failing sunset, ancient castle and evil enchantress of the fairy tale are deliberately contrasted with the brilliant sunrise, shining castles and angelic beings of heaven.

This then is a literary version of a traditional tale, and since the rest of the autobiography is full of poetical and mystical references to doves, nightingales, morning and evening sun, rings, dewdrops and death, I would guess that the moody music of the opening few paragraphs – the sorrowful lovers, setting sun and mourning doves – is Johann Heinrich Jung’s own. Does this make the story less authentic? I don’t see it that way. Tellers of traditional tales have always enriched, altered and embellished them as they see fit, and a story written down will always be different from the same tale told aloud.

What does the story mean? Why are the lovers so sad? Is it because they know they’ll grow old and die, because evening is here and the day nearly over, because their young love may not last and the sun is already half beneath the mountain?  Are they 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?

Or is the owl-woman associated with Athena of classical mythology, goddess of wisdom, whose emblem was the owl? Discussing the tale with me, the author Susan Price thought this might be so, writing:

My impression is a little different. For one, the old woman is associated with the owl, which associates her with Athena. She's also a huntress, who seems to prize and cage (or guard) unmarried girls, which associates her with Artemis. Both these goddesses had their darker, Death sides.

            The youngsters are lost in a wood - wode[5] within this wood. The forest has long been associated with the dangers and traps of life, some of them sexual – but mostly, I think, to do with 'losing one's way' or losing one's self. There's also a tradition of the girl about to be married mourning her single life: her happy life at home with her parents. She's about to launch into adult life, with all its responsibility and cares.

The owl-woman snatches her away from all this and fastens her securely in a cage – but doesn't otherwise mistreat her. The old woman also frees the young man without harming him and tells him that if he does the right thing, he can free the girl.
I think the old woman is a kind of marriage counsellor![6]

This is a thought-provoking comment and a good example of the ways in which fairy tales can be differently interpreted. 

Flowers and owls… owls and flowers… a blood-red flower with a pearl-sized drop of dew at its heart.[7] To modern eyes the sexual imagery is clear: betrothed young maidens cannot remain maidens for ever. But what is the owl doing in this tale? What does it symbolise? Wisdom, or death? The ‘wise owl’ entered northern European folklore rather late, via classical education. To ordinary folk it was primarily known as a bird of death. In The Mabinogion the owl is a hated outcast, a bird of ill omen rather than of wisdom, and this is supported by Chaucer’s ‘The oule ek, that of deth the bode bringeth’ [‘the owl too, that brings tidings of death’], Shakespeare’s ‘Whilst the scritch-owle, scritching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In remembrance of a shrowd’, and Gilbert White’s ‘From this screaming probably arose the common people’s imaginary species of screech-owl, which they superstitiously think attends the windows of dying persons’. Even John Ruskin felt uneasy about owls: ‘Whatever wise people may say of them, I at least have found the owl’s cry always prophetic of mischief to me.’[8] Moreover, in a variant of the tale noted by the brothers Grimm, it is a crow the old woman turns herself into – another bird associated with death.

In Alan Garner’s 1967 novel The Owl Service, which is based on the story of Blodeuedd, the destructive force of the ancient legend is stored in a set of patterned dinner plates hidden in the attic of an old Welsh house. The stylised pattern can be perceived two different ways, as owls or as flowers, and the plates act as a kind of battery or repository of power, with owls as the negative and flowers as the positive poles. In terms of Garner’s book, this alternating current means not only that the emotional pattern of the legend keeps repeating down the centuries, but that his teenage characters switch between positive and negative constructions of the self.

In Jorinda and Joringel, the constrictive power of age is represented by an owl, the liberating power of youth by a flower. Years ago in my early twenties I was walking through London with a friend. We were laughing and chattering, and a middle-aged woman passing by leaned over and said to us in a low voice but with extraordinary venom, ‘One day you’ll be like me.’ As a memento mori it was quite something and we both shivered, but we agreed later that we never would be like her. We would never, ever be that bitter.

That brush with mortality has stayed with me, however, and I have to recognise at least the existence of those dark emotions – envy of youth, anger at old age, fear of death: ‘When [the old woman] saw Joringel coming she was angry, very angry, and scolded, and spat poison and gall at him, but she could not come within two paces of him.’ In the end the old woman is powerless against the vigour and sexual potency of youth. Fairy tales are emotional amplifiers. We look into them as if into old, dimly-silvered mirrors, and see ourselves and the world around us oddly changed. Analysing a fairy tale can be a deeply interesting intellectual exercise, but that is not what the tale itself is for. It exists like music, to work directly on our feelings. Jorinda and Joringel is short and there’s hardly any plot, but it is intense. It takes the dark emotions and transmutes them, leaving us to remember the beauty of the forest, the sadness of the lovers and the strange little song Jorinda sings.

Like age looking wistfully back on a time of flowers.

 

 

This essay with many others is published in my book ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy Tales’, available in print or as an e-book from Amazon. (Click this link.) 

 

Footnotes

---

[1] Blodeuwedd does not appear to be a word for ‘owl’ in modern Welsh, however.

[2] The Mabinogion, tr. Sioned Davies, 244

[3] ‘Jorinda and Joringel’, KHM 69, Grimm’s Fairy Tales

[4] The Autobiography of Heinrich Stilling, tr. S Jackson, 22

[5] ‘Wode within this wood’: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Sc 1. Wode: adj: ‘mad’, OE. wōd

[6] Susan Price, personal communication.

[7] In The Autobiography of Heinrich Stilling the flower holds not a dew-drop but a real pearl.

[8] Opie, Iona and Tatem, Moira, A Dictionary of Superstitions, 295

 

Picture credit: 

'She turned herself into a cat or a screech-owl': Jorinda and Joringel, by Arthur Rackham/

Envoi to Strong Heroines: MAID MALEEN, a study of endurance through trauma

This essay was originally published in the 12th issue of Gramarye, Winter 2017

 

To round off my series of thirty fairytales which feature strong heroines, I'd like to repost an essay  I wrote a couple of years ago about a fairy tale heroine whom many might not consider strong. For how can a girl who spends seven years imprisoned in a dark tower be an example of strength? Especially one who then seems to sink into a dark pit of post-traumatic depression?

 

I argue that she is indeed an example of strength, and that our culture's focus on the kind of physical courage expressed in fighting and action leads us to forget or underestimate other forms of bravery. There isn't very much fighting in fairy tales! Often what they celebrate is the mental and spiritual courage all of us need to persist, endure, carry on in the face of pain, hardship, rejection, persecution. And this form of courage is often the courage of women.

 

You can read Maid Maleen in full at this link, but I paraphrase it below. Though included in the Grimms' fairy tales (KHM 198), it's never been popular. 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), and 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 fairy tale 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 (#15 in this series) or the Mastermaid (#7) 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 are so strikingly alike 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 that, in the end, all mortal things fade so. 

  

 

 

If you have enjoyed this essay and series on fairytales you might also enjoy my collection of essays on folk and fairytales, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, available online or by contacting me directly through my website: https://www.katherinelangrish.co.uk/contact-katherine-langrish/

 

 

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[1] Throughout this essay I am indebted to Heather Robbinsof the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, 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

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Picture credits:

Maid Maleen - Arthur Rackham

Maid Maleen -  R. Leinweber

The False Bride Maleen - Edouard Manet via the website Wonderlit (I have been unable otherwise to source this)

Irish Tower - Arthur Rackham

Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #8: ASCHENPUTTEL

 Aschenputtel: The Cinderella of the Brothers Grimm

The most familiar of fairytales can seem strange when we read a different version from the one we’re used to. Most of us know the one generally offered to children, the one Disney adapted, the one based on Charles Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’. That Cinderella is a long-suffering, patient, gentle girl; her fairy godmother is a civilised sponsor who launches her protégé into society with the aid of delightful conjuring tricks, transforming pumpkin and mice into a splendid coach and uniformed servitors. At the end of Perrault's tale, Cinderella forgives her stepsisters and marries them off to ‘two great lords of the court’. Everything is in excellent taste.

But the heroine of the Grimms’ ‘Aschenputtel’ is different. Her story is less literary, more magical: almost savage in tone and detail. There is blood within the shoe. The dead return as birds. There's no pumpkin coach, no fairy godmother. No panic, no deadlines, no clocks striking twelve. No glass slipper – and no forgiveness.

The mother’s deathbed adjuration, that if her daughter remains good, she will watch over her from heaven, is less a pious wish than a supernatural promise, fulfilled when her father asks his daughters what he should bring them as gifts and Cinderella asks not for beautiful clothes, pearls and jewels as her step-sisters do, but for ‘the first branch which knocks against your hat on the way home’. Like the rose in Beauty and the Beast, this humble gift will prove the most precious, as well as being something that will certainly pass under her step-mother and step-sisters’ radar. Cinderella plants the hazel twig on her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears. And in contrast to the civilised patronage of Perrault’s fairy godmother, the power the girl derives from her true mother’s grave is a miraculous inheritance that rises from the earth in green sap and leaves, with spirit-like birds sitting in the branches.

At her call, these birds flock down to perform the impossible tasks her stepmother sets for her – and each time Cinderella succeeds, the stepmother breaks her promise to allow her to go to the festival. We are not meant to view this realistically, or ask why the stepmother and Cinderella should expect any different outcome from each other after the first demonstration. We are witnessing the breaking of a ritual, magical contract which will earn a ritual, magical punishment.

The unbroken bond between Cinderella and her dead mother trumps the step-mother’s broken promises. For the next three nights, as the white birds in the hazel tree shower down upon her their transformative gold and silver,  Cinderella stage-manages the whole affair. She goes to the dance alone. She leaves when she pleases. She runs, climbs trees and jumps out of them. She performs lightning costume-changes, and she lies low to deceive the family.

It's a story which pulls few punches. Quite frankly, a great deal of the pleasure it affords is the pleasure of revenge. This Cinderella gets her own back on everyone who has ill-treated her. When her neglectful father’s pigeon house is destroyed, we shouldn't think of a cute ornamental dove-cot sitting on a pole. We should imagine the pigeon-house of a grand mansion: a great, circular, stone-built affair with hundreds of niches inside it for nesting places, and a revolving ladder from which servants might collect eggs and young birds. Its destruction would be a social and financial blow. Her father also loses his magnificent pear tree - it is chopped to pieces – and her ambitious step-sisters fare even worse. And, an incidental detail - the prince doesn't need to try the slipper on the foot of every girl in the kingdom. By the third night he's got a very good idea of where Cinderella lives, so the mysterious maiden has to be one of the three daughters.

The translation is by Margaret Hunt.

The wife of a rich man fell sick, and as she felt that her end was drawing near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, “Dear child, be good and pious, and then the good God will always protect you, and I will look down on you from heaven, and see you.” Thereupon she closed her eyes and departed. Every day the maiden went out to her mother’s grave and wept, and she remained pious and good. When winter came the snow spread a white sheet over the grave, and by the time the spring sun had drawn it off again, the man had taken another wife.

The woman brought with her into the house two daughters, who were beautiful and fair, but vile and black of heart. Now began a bad time for the poor step-child. “Is the stupid goose to sit in the parlour with us?” they said. “He who wants to eat bread must earn it; out with the kitchen-wench.” They took her pretty clothes away from her, put an old grey bedgown on her, and gave her wooden shoes. “Just look at the proud princess, how decked out she is!” they cried, and laughed, and led her into the kitchen. There she had to do hard work from morning till night, get up before daybreak, carry water, light fires, cook and wash.  Besides this, the sisters did her every imaginable injury – they mocked her and emptied her peas and lentils into the ashes, so that she was forced to sit and pick them out again. In the evening when she had worked till she was weary she had no bed to go to, but had to sleep by the hearth in the cinders. And as on that account she always looked dusty and dirty, they called her Cinderella.

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,” said he, “what will you have?”  “Father, break off for me the first branch that knocks against your hat on the way home.” So he bought beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels for his two step-daughters, and on his way home as he was riding through a green thicket, a hazel twig brushed against him and knocked off his hat. Then he broke off the branch and took it with him. When he reached home he gave his step-daughters the things which they had wished for, and to Cinderella he gave the branch from the hazel bush. Cinderella thanked him, went to her mother’s grave and planted the branch on it, and wept so much that the tears fell down on it and watered it. And it grew and became a handsome tree. Thrice a day Cinderella went and sat beneath it and wept and prayed, and a little white bird always came on the tree, and if Cinderella wished for anything, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for. 

It happened, however, that the King gave orders for a festival which was to last three days and to which all the beautiful young girls in the country were invited, in order that his son might choose himself a bride. When the two step-sisters heard that they too were to appear among the number, they were delighted, called Cinderella and said: “Comb our hair for us, brush our shoes and fasten our buckles, for we are going to the wedding at the King’s palace.” Cinderella obeyed, but wept, for she too would have liked to go with them to the dance, and begged her step-mother to allow her to do so.  “You go, Cinderella!” said she; “covered in dust and dirt as you are, and would go to the festival? You have no clothes and shoes, and yet would dance?” However, as Cinderella went on asking, the step-mother said at last, “I have emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes for you; if you have picked them out again in two hours, you shall go with us.”

The maiden went through the back door into the garden and called, “You tame pigeons, you turtledoves, and all you birds beneath the sky, come and help me to pick

The good into the pot

The bad into the crop.”

Then two white pigeons came in by the kitchen window, and afterwards the turtledoves, and at last all the birds beneath the sky, came whirring and crowding in, and alighted amongst the ashes. And the pigeons nodded with their heads and began pick, pick, pick, and all the rest began also to pick, pick, pick, and gathered all the good grains into the dish. Hardly had one hour passed before they had finished and all flew out again. Then the girl took the dish to her step-mother, and was glad, for she believed that now she would be allowed to go with them to the festival. 

             But the step-mother said, “No, Cinderella, you have no clothes and you can not dance; you would only be laughed at.” And as Cinderella wept at this, the step-mother said, “If you can pick two dishes of lentils out of the ashes for me in one house, you shall go with us.” For she thought to herself, “That she most certainly cannot do again.” 

When the step-mother had emptied the two dishes of lentils among the ashes, the maiden went through the back door into the garden and cried: “You tame pigeons, you turtledoves, and all you birds beneath the sky, come and help me to pick

The good into the pot

The bad into the crop.”

Then two white pigeons came in by the kitchen window, and afterwards the turtledoves, and at last all the birds beneath the sky, came whirring and crowding in, and alighted amongst the ashes. And the pigeons nodded with their heads and began pick, pick, pick, and all the rest began also to pick, pick, pick, and gathered all the good seeds into the dishes, and before half an hour was over they had already finished, and all flew out again. Then the maiden carried the dishes to ther step-mother and was delighted, and believed that she might now go with them to the wedding. But the step-mother said, “All this will not help; you cannot go with us, for you have no clothes and can not dance; we should be ashamed of you.” On this she turned her back on Cinderella and hurried away with her two proud daughters.
   

            As no one was now at home, Cinderella went to her mother’s grave below the hazel tree, and cried,

            “Shiver and quiver, little tree,

            Silver and gold throw down on me.”

             Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She put on the dress with all speed, and went to the wedding. Her step-sisters and the step-mother did not know her and thought she must be a foreign princess, for she looked so beautiful in the golden dress.  They never once thought of Cinderella and believed she was still at home in the dirt, picking lentils out of the ashes. The prince approached her, took her by the hand and danced with her. He would dance with no other maiden, and never let loose of her hand, and if any one else came to invite her, he said, “This is my partner.”

 

            She danced till it was evening, and then she wanted to go home. But the King’s son said, “I will go with you and bear you company,” for he wished to see to what family the beautiful maiden belonged. She escaped from him, however, and sprang into the pigeon-house. The King’s son waited until her father came home, and then he told him that the unknown maiden had leapt into the pigeon-house. The old man thought, “Can it be Cinderella?” and they had to bring him an axe and a pickaxe that he might hew the pigeon house to pieces, but no one was inside it. And when they got home, Cinderella lay in her dirty clothes among the ashes, and a dim little oil lamp was burning on the mantle-piece, for Cinderella had jumped down quickly from the back of the pigeon-house and had run to the little hazel tree, and there she had taken off her beautiful clothes and laid them on the grave, and the bird had taken them away again, and then she had seated herself in the kitchen amongst the ashes in her grey gown.

            Next day when the festival began afresh, and her parents and the step-sisters had gone once more, Cinderella went to the hazel tree and said,

 “Shiver and quiver, my little tree,

            Silver and gold throw down over me.”

 
Then the bird threw down a much more beautiful dress than before. And when Cinderella appeared at the wedding in this dress, everyone was astonished at her beauty. The King’s son had waited until she came, and instantly took her by the hand, and danced with no one but her. When others came and invited her, he said, “This is my partner.” When evening came she wished to leave, and the King’s son followed her and wanted to see to which house she went. But she sprang away from him and into the garden behind the house. There stood a beautiful tree on which hung the most magnificent pears. She clambered so nimbly between the branches like a squirrel that the King’s son did not know where she had gone. He waited until her father came and said to him, “The unknown maiden has escaped from me, and I believe she has climbed into the pear tree.” The father thought, “Can it be Cinderella?” and had an axe brought and cut the tree down, but no one was in it. And when they got into the kitchen, Cinderella lay there among the ashes as usual, for she had jumped down on the other side of the tree, had taken the beautiful dress to the bird on the little hazel tree, and put on her grey gown.

            On the third day, when the parents and sisters had gone away, Cinderella went once more to her mother’s grave and said to the little tree, 

“Shiver and quiver, my little tree,

            Silver and gold throw down over me.”

And now the bird threw down to her a dress which was more splendid and magnificent than any she had yet had, and the slippers were golden. And when she went to the festival in the dress, no one knew how to speak for astonishment. The King’s son danced with her only, and if anyone invited her to dance, he said, “This is my partner.”

             When evening came, Cinderella wished to leave, and the King’s son was anxious to go with her, but she escaped from him so quickly he could not follow her.  The King’s son, however, had caused the whole staircase to be smeared with pitch, and there, where she ran down it, the maiden’s left slipper had remained stuck. The King’s son picked it up,and it was small and dainty, and all golden. Next morning he went to his father and said, “No one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits.” 

            Then the two sisters were glad, for they had pretty feet. The eldest went with the shoe into her room and wanted to try it on, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave he a knife and said, “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.” The maiden cut the toe off, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain and went out to the King’s son. He took her on his horse as his bride and rode away with her, but the way took them past the grave and there on the hazel tree sat the two pigeons and cried, 

            “Turn and peep, turn and peep,

            There’s blood within the shoe,

            The shoe it is too small for her,

            The true bride waits for you.”

Then he looked at the foot and saw how the blood was trickling from it. He turned his horse around and took the false bride home again and said she was not the true one, and that the other sister was to put the shoe on. Then this one went into her chamber and got her toes safely into the shoe, but her heel was too large. So her other gave her a knife and said, “Cut a bit off your heel; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.” The maiden cut a bit off her heel, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son. He took her on his horse as his bride and rode away with her, but when they passed the hazel tree, the two little doves sat on it and cried,

“Turn and peep, turn and peep,

            There’s blood within the shoe,

            The shoe it is too small for her,

            The true bride waits for you.”

He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe and how it had stained her white stocking quite red. Then he turned his horse and took the false bride home again. “This also is not the right one,” said he, “have you no other daughter?” “No,” said the man, “there is still a little stunted kitchen wench which my late wife left behind her, but she cannot possibly be the bride.”

            The King’s son said he was to send her up to him, but the mother answered, “Oh no, she is much too dirty, she cannot show herself!” But he absolutely insisted on it, and Cinderella had to be called. She first washed her hands and face clean, and then went and bowed before the King’s son, who gave her the golden shoe. Then she seated herself on a stool, drew her foot out of the heavy wooden shoe and put it into the slipper, which fitted like a glove. And when she rose up and the King’s son looked at her face he recognised the beautiful maiden who had danced with him and cried, “That is the true bride!” The step-mother and the two sisters were horrified and became pale with rage; however, he took Cinderella on his horse and rode away with her. As they passed by the hazel tree, the two white doves cried, 

“Turn and peep, turn and peep,

            No blood is in the shoe,

            The shoe is not too small for her,

            The true bride rides with you,”

and when they had cried that, the two came flying down and perched on Cinderella’s shoulders, one on the right, the other on the left, and remained sitting there.

            When the wedding with the King’s son was to be celebrated, the two false sisters came and wanted to get into favour with Cinderella and share her good fortune. When the betrothed couple went to church, the elder was at the right side, and the younger at the left, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards as they came back, the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each and so, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness for the rest of their days. 

Picture Credits: 

Cinderella: by Edmund Dulac

Cinderella at the hearth: John Everett Millais
Aschenputtel at her mother's grave: by Liga-Marta

Aschenputtel and the turtledoves: by Alexander Zick 
Aschenputtel and the stepsisters: by Hermann Vogel
Cinderella at the ball: by Edmund Dulac
Shiver and Quiver, Little Tree: by Millicent Sowerby 
Pitch on the stairs: by John D Batten
Cinderella running: by Arthur Rackham

Cinderella tries on the slipper: by Walter Crane