Be bold, be bold! (But not too bold.)

People often assume there aren’t very many English fairy tales.  There are, of course, but they were eclipsed in popularity by the much better-known German and French tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. During the 19^th century the English were, on the whole, keener on translating other peoples’ fairy tales than collecting their own: possibly (as I say in another place) because the Europe-wide fashion for collecting traditional tales was driven by nationalism, and Victorian Englishmen didn’t feel they had anything much to prove. So generations of English children grew up knowing about Rumpelstilskin and Cinderella, and nothing about Tom Tit Tot and Ashie-Coat.  

It took an Australian Jew, Joseph Jacobs, to notice this and do something about it. ‘Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?’ he asks in the introduction to his 'English Fairy Tales’, 1898. ‘The present volume contains only a selection out of some 140, of which I have found traces in this country. It is probable that many more exist.’

 

One of those tales is an all-time favourite of mine, ‘Mr Fox’.  It’s the oldest known version of the ‘Bluebeard’ story, and I wrote about it in my recent book ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles’, where I explain why I think it’s about a million times better than ‘Bluebeard’. It’s about a girl called Lady Mary who becomes curious – maybe even suspicious – when her fiancé, the suave Mr Fox, is unwilling to let her visit his castle. So when he announces he has to go away for a day just prior to their wedding, she sets off deep into the woods to find the place for herself.

And there it is, a beautiful castle: but above the gateway a strange motto is carved into the stone: ‘Be bold, be bold’. Lady Mary passes under the gateway and into the courtyard. The place is quite empty, not a soul anywhere about. Crossing the yard to the the doorway of the keep, she finds the same motto again, this time longer: ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’.  On she goes:

Still she went on till she came into the hall, and went up the broad stairs till she came to a door in the gallery, over which was written:

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold

Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.

But Lady Mary was a brave one, she was, and she opened the door, and what do you think she saw? Why bodies and skeletons of beautiful young ladies all stained with blood. So Lady Mary thought it was high time to get out of that horrid place…

As she hurries down the stairs she sees Mr Fox himself coming into the hall, dragging a beautiful young woman behind him who seems to have fainted. Lady Mary hides behind a cask, and witnesses Mr Fox cutting off the young woman’s hand:

Just as he got near Lady Mary, Mr Fox saw a diamond ring glittering on the finger of the young lady he was dragging, and he tried to pull it off. But it was tightly fixed … so Mr Fox cursed and swore, and drew his sword, raised it, and brought it down upon the hand of the poor lady. The sword cut off the hand, which jumped into the air, and fell of all places into Lady Mary’s lap. Mr Fox looked about a bit but did not think of looking behind the cask, so at last he went on dragging the young lady up the stairs into the Bloody Chamber.

Lady Mary runs home, but that’s not the end. Next day this self-possessed and steely heroine meets Mr Fox at a splendid family breakfast where the contract of their marriage is to be signed. ‘How pale you are this morning, my dear,’ exclaims Mr Fox. 

‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I had a bad night’s rest last night. I had horrible dreams.’

‘Dreams go by contraries,’ said Mr Fox; ‘but tell us your dream, and your sweet voice will make the time pass till the happy hour comes.’

‘I dreamed,’ said Lady Mary, ‘that I went yestermorn to your castle, and I found it in the woods, with high walls and a deep moat, and over the gateway was written:

               Be bold, be bold.’

‘But it is not so, nor it was not so,’ said Mr Fox.

As Lady Mary continues and the mottoes intensify their warnings, so Mr Fox’s denials become stronger: ‘It is not so and it was not so. And God forbid it should be so’ – till finally Lady Mary springs to her feet. 

‘It is so and it was so. Here’s hand and ring I have to show,’ and pulled out the lady’s hand from her dress and pointed it straight at Mr Fox.

At once her brothers and her friends drew their swords and cut Mr Fox into a thousand pieces.

This is a great story with a brave, intelligent heroine, and it’s beautifully structured. I’ve told it aloud many times to children and they always love it. But where did Joseph Jacobs find it?  Well, he found it as an addendum to Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition of the complete works of Shakespeare ( ‘Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare’). 

This of course isn't the original 1790 edition, which I couldn't find, but from 1821.

There’s a bit in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ Act I, Sc 1, where Benedick says to Claudio: ‘Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor ‘twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.’  A certain Mr Blakeway contributed a note to explain this reference:

I believe none of the commentators have understood this; it is an allusion, as the speaker says, to an old tale, which may perhaps still be extant in some collections of such things, or which Shakspeare may have heard, as I have, related by a great aunt, in his childhood. 

Mr Blakeway then recounts the whole tale, though with less artistry than Joseph Jacobs: he’s supplying a note, after all, not writing a story:

Over the portal of the hall was written: ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold:’ she advanced: over the stair-case, the same inscription: she went up: over the entrance of a gallery, the same: she proceeded: over the door of a chamber, – ‘Be bold, be bold,but not too bold, lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.’ She opened it; it was full of skeletons, tubs of blood, &c. She retreated in haste…

Blakeway concludes,

Such is the old tale to which Shakspeare evidently alludes, and which has often ‘froze my young blood’ when I was a child. I will not apologize for repeating it, since it is manifest that such old wives’ tales often prove the best elucidation of this writer’s meaning.

John Brickdale Blakeway was born in Shrewsbury in 1765, the eldest son of Joshua Blakeway and Elizabeth Brickdale. He studied law, was ordained in 1793, became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1807 and died in 1826. His great-aunt probably told young John this tale when he was about ten, and she must have heard it in her own childhood some time between say 1710 and 1725.  This is still over a century since Shakespeare’s death, but the story happens to be one which is very easy to remember, full of repetition – the tale is actually told twice – and memorable phrases. (I’ve known children who could tell it well having heard it only once.) In 1598 Shakespeare’s Benedick quotes one of these phrases:‘It is not so and it was not so and God forbid it should be so’, and calls it an ‘old tale’. 

Edmund Spenser’s immensely long narrative poem ‘The Faerie Queene’, references the other quotable quote from 'Mr Fox' in Book 3, Canto XI, verses 50 to 54: when the gallant ‘warlike Maid’ Britomart (allegorically Chastity) is exploring the House of Busirane (the House of Violence and Lust) to find and rescue the enchanter Busirane’s tortured victim Amoret. As Britomart makes her way through room after room decorated with pictures and tapestries of ravished women (and one boy), she notices something else:

Over the door thus written she did spy

Be bold: she oft and oft it over-read…

Just like Lady Mary, Britomart is not dismayed - ‘But forward with bold steps into the next room went’. And just as in ‘Mr Fox’, the castle is silent and empty - ‘Strange thing it seemed’!  Eventually,

…as she looked about, she did behold

How over that same door was likewise writ

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere Be bold,

That much she mazed, and could not construe it

By any riddling skill or common wit.

At last she spied at that room’s upper end,

Another iron door, on which was writ,

Be not too bold…

The first three books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ were published in 1596. This therefore appears to be the earliest reference to the ‘old tale’ of ‘Mr Fox’.  It must once have been very well known.  But if John Blakemore hadn’t written it down, it would have disappeared. His account is the only complete source for this English fairy tale. 

I was talking about all this this recently with a good friend, the author John Dickinson (who writes wonderful fantasy and sci-fi): in fact it was he who pointed me in the direction of ‘The Faerie Queene’. He electrified me by telling me that in his local church of St Mary in Painswick, Gloucestershire, the words ‘Be bold, be bold’ are actually cut into one of the pillars. Local tradition has it that the words were carved by one of a group of Parliamentarian soldiers besieged in the church during the English Civil War, and that they are a quotation from ‘The Faerie Queene’. I was so excited about this that John invited me to come over and see the inscription.  And here it is.

TH.

WHO. MAD

THIS. RICH

ARD FORT

BE BOLD BE BOLD

BUT NOT TO

BOLD AND WHE

                                             RB         

Let’s take the first bit first.  In modern spelling: ‘THOU WHO MADE THIS RICHARD FORT BE BOLD BE BOLD BUT NOT TOO BOLD’. Some man named Richard Fort is addressing God (who ‘made’ him) and adding an – appeal? a prayer? a command? a warning? – perhaps to God, perhaps to himself, to ‘be bold, be bold, but not too bold.’ 

Painswick Church was indeed besieged in the year 1644. There’s an account in ‘A Cotteswold Manor; being the history of Painswick’ written by the wonderfully named Welbore St Clair Baddeley and published in 1907. In 1644 the countryside around the city of Gloucester (which had survived a siege by Royalist forces the previous autumn) was in turmoil, with Royalists and Parliamentarians exchanging raids and committing atrocities on both sides. Enter the fearsome Colonel Mynne, leading a regiment of Royalist Catholic infantry raised in Ireland. Arriving in Bristol, Mynne and his men stormed their way across Gloucestershire and in February 1644 arrived at Painswick. The Parliamentarian Attorney General, Backhouse, quartered in Gloucester, writes: 

‘We heard … that Colonel Mynne and St Leger with the Irish forces march’t to Painswicke for subsistence,  but indeed to plunder the country, to prevent which, our Governor (Massey) drew out a party of Horse and Foot, where there was a skirmish and some losse on both sides.’ 

Whether this skirmish was successful or not, some time later Mynne’s Royalist forces withdrew and a garrison of Massey’s Parliamentarian troops moved into Painswick. In the back-and-forth of that wretched time, they were not to remain there long. The King’s man Sir William Vavasour marched on Painswick with ‘a strong brigade’ and two ‘culverins’ or light cannons. The Parliament soldiers, who had taken up a defensive position in a house near the church, were not strong enough to hold off anything much bigger than a plundering party, and had been told to make good their retreat down the steep hill towards Brookthorp if the Royalist force was substantial. But the lieutenant commanding them, ‘… not understanding the strength of the (opponents) army’ and encouraged by ‘many willing people of the neighbourhood in that weak hold’, instead of withdrawing, remained to fight. Finding himself overwhelmed ‘upon the first onset’, he deserted the house and took his men into the church. It was a move from the frying pan into the fire: the Royalists burned down the door and threw ‘hand-granadoes’ into the church where ‘some few were slain in defending the place, and the rest taken prisoners.’  [This contemporary account is quoted in the ‘History of the Church of St Mary at Painswick’ by Welbore St Clair Baddeley, 1902]

Here, then, is the likely scenario for the cutting of those words ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’ on the church pillar at Painswick. Richard Fort – whether he was one of the ‘willing’ neighbours or a Parliamentarian soldier – was holed up inside St Mary’s with the other men who were the victims of their lieutenant’s mistake. They’d barred the doors, they couldn’t get out, and they were listening to the yells and jeers of the Royalist force outside in the churchyard – and wondering what would be the next move. 

How long did they have?  Was it really long enough for Richard Fort to carve all those words? And why did they spring to his mind in the first place? Had the lieutenant urged his men to ‘be bold’?  (See what had come of that!) Parliamentarians called Royalists ‘malignants’: Painswick people had already had a taste of the ravening Colonel Mynne. Perhaps two things came together in Richard Fort's head – the adjuration to ‘be bold’, and the enclosed stone trap of the church, with the enemy about to burst in.  Perhaps Richard was an educated man who had read ‘The Faerie Queene’ and remembered the armed figure of Chastity, Britomart, waiting for her enemy, afraid to lay her weapons aside: 

Thus there she waited until eventide,

Yet living creature none she saw appear:

And now sad shadows ‘gan the world to hide,

From mortall view, and wrap in darkness drear.

Yet n’ould she doff her weary arms, for fear

Of secret danger, nor let sleep oppress

Her heavy eyes with nature’s burden dear,

But drew herself aside in sikernesse [assuredness]

And her wellpointed weapons did about her dress.

Or it may be Richard simply remembered the story of ‘Mr Fox’ told to him in childhood by his mother or aunt or sister, and saw its relevance, and began cutting those words to distract himself.  Did he even feel his God had let him down? ‘Thou who made this Richard Fort be bold be bold but not too bold…’ I think he did carve the words while he waited, especially as you can see at the end of the inscription on the pillar the shallow-cut beginning of two more words: ‘AND WHE…’

What was he going to say? We’ll never know. He didn’t have time to finish, so perhaps he was interrupted: perhaps, before he could grind those letters any deeper, the church door began smoking; perhaps it burst into flame. Perhaps these unfinished letters resemble those found in another stone trap, the fictional Chamber of Mazarbul in Tolkien’s ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’:

‘The last thing written is a trailing scrawl of elf letters: they are coming.’

Picture credits

Mr Fox, illustration by John Batten from Joseph Jacobs' 'English Fairy Tales' 

Britomart in the house of Busyrane, by Walter Crane

'Be bold', inscription on pillar, St Mary's Painswick, photo by Katherine Langrish

Siege artillery of the mid 17th century, Battle of Edgehill, http://www.britishbattles.com/the-battle-of-edgehill/

Magical Classics: "Puck of Pook's Hill" by Rudyard Kipling

John Dickinson on the midsummer magic of Kipling's children's classic:

Two children, Dan and Una, perform a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream three times on midsummer eve, in a fairy ring under the shadow of Pook’s Hill.  They find they have summoned Puck himself,  the last of the ‘People of the Hills’.  Through him they meet characters out of the past – a Norman knight, a Roman centurion, a Tudor craftsman, and in the second book, Rewards and Fairies, many others including St Wilfred and Elizabeth I.   Each one tells their story.

There are no dragons in Puck, no wizards, no spells except a little charm that Puck himself weaves with oak, ash and thorn.  The magic is a framework for the stories, like a hazy golden halo around each one.   So they are not really ‘fantasy’ as we now understand it.  They are scenes out of history: the things that over the centuries (Kipling believed) had made England what it was.  

At the beginning and end of each story there is a little poem: a sort of coda to the tale.  Some have become famous in their own right (this is where you will find If… for example). In one of these Kipling tells us clearly what response he hoped for from his young readers.   

 ‘Land of our Birth, our faith, our pride,

For whose dear sake our fathers died;

O Motherland, we pledge to thee

Head, heart and hand through the years to be!’

(From The Children’s Song)

We are wary, these days, about telling history to inspire patriotism.  We know what came next.  If Dan was eight or nine when the stories were written, as he seems to be, then he would have been the same age as Kipling’s own son who was lost in the trenches in 1915. Kipling did not know, then, what was coming.  But he knew what might.  

Read the stories again.  There’s a mischievous delight in them, but also a sadness, a sense of hopes extinguished and things lost. There are no rewards.  Crowds do not cheer and trumpets do not sound . ‘Finish’ says the word on the bricked up archway that the young centurion finds at the end of the road to Hadrian’s Wall. The Tudor architect gets his knighthood for entirely the wrong reason.  The fairies raise a young boy hoping to make him a king, and he is fated to become a slave.  As the cold iron ring clicks around his neck Puck says:

“…he must go among folk in housen henceforward, doing what they want done, or what he knows they need, all Old England over.  Never will he be his own master, nor yet ever any man’s.  He will get half he gives, and give twice what he gets, till he draws his last breath; and if he lays aside his load before he draws that last breath, all his work will go for naught.”

The words could have been spoken for any of the characters the children meet.  They could have been spoken for Dan and Una themselves.  It’s about unseen virtue, found where you least expect it.  Harsh, hook-nosed Baron de Aquila schemes in his castle to prevent another Norman invasion.  A fat, drunken Roman general, supplanted by younger men, is transformed in the desperate battle for the Wall.  And the lead role in the climax of the first book goes to a despised Jew.  It is Kadmiel who tricks the stupid Christians and traps a bad King, so that one key phrase passes into Magna Carta and becomes the heart of the law of England. And he never even sees it signed. ‘Nay. Who am I to meddle with things too high for me? I returned to Bury, and lent money on the autumn crops. Why not?’  That is Kipling’s kind of hero. 

Well.  We could call it Edwardian moralising, and sneer at it for that.  Fair’s fair.  He would have sneered at the easy, wish-fulfilling stuff, lightly peppered with teenage angst, that we serve up for children now.   But it’s a brave writer who sneers at Kipling. 

Read the stories a third time (that’s the magic, you see). Better still, find someone who will read them aloud with you.  His words were made to be heard. Curl up and listen. Remember the delight of finding a secret friend – a magic friend, on the bare hill above your house.  Imagine these strangely-dressed people, who tell stories of courage and cleverness and fate in voices as rich and grainy as the land they describe, and yet who respect you for the things you know that they never could.  It’s all there, the wonder and high adventure hammered together into the words with the skill of a smith of gods.  ‘Bold as a wolf, cunning as a fox was Witta!’ Hear the drum-beat in that line, as the Viking pirate steers his archers in to fight fierce apes for African gold!  PC Kipling was not (and his natural history was shocking).  But he could write.  He really could. You didn’t need me to tell you so.

John Dickinson worked in the Ministry of Defence, Cabinet Office and NATO before leaving the civil service to begin writing. His distinguished YA fantasy novel ‘The Cup of the World’ and its sequels ‘The Widow and The King’ and ‘The Fatal Child’, set in a far-off, war-troubled medieval kingdom, are full of compelling, flawed characters and beautiful, ominous writing.  John has also published a historical novel for adults: ‘The Lightstep’, set in a German palatinate at the time of the French Revolution, a science fiction novel called ‘WE’ which was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and for younger children, 'Muddle and Win: The Battle for Sally Jones', in which an angel and a demon struggle for the soul of the eponymous - and rather too Good - heroine. It's delightful, and you can find my review here.

Picture credits:

All illustrations by HR Millar, from 'Puck of Pook's Hill' by Rudyard Kipling,  Macmillan & Co 1906

'MUDDLE AND WIN: The Battle For Sally Jones' by John Dickinson

If I described this book as ‘The Screwtape Letters for children’ I would be both spot on and way, way off at the same time. Because even though it’s about a devil and an angel and their battle to possess, or at least influence, the soul of young Sally Jones, it’s not a religious book.  And therein lies its strength.  John Dickinson is too nuanced a writer to fall for a polarised good/evil view of morality. This is not a story about Sin. Perish the thought. Neither is it a story about Being Saved.  It’s a story about the dark side of the mind – the soul, if you will – and the multifarious ways in which we manage to convince ourselves that we’re in the right and everyone else is being totally unreasonable. And it’s funny, and it’s scary, and it’s very, very sharp in its observations of human nature.

Deep down – deep, deep down, Dickinson suggests – everyone has a dark and fiery place within them, accessible from a trapdoor in one of the backrooms of the mind:

There won’t be much light there, and there’ll be things scattered all over the floor.  Most of it’s stuff you’ve always known about but don’t get out and look at too much.  You start clearing it to one side.   Never mind the dust.  Never mind the smell.  (Listen – even the best-kept minds have rooms like this.)  When you find you’re shifting aside thoughts you would never, ever try to explain to anybody – and there will be some – then you’re in the right place.

Underneath it all there’ll be a trap door.  …If it’s locked, you open it.  You have the key, of course.

I love that sinister last line.  Of course we do.  And below the trap door is a dark void, and at the bottom of that – well, we don’t get anywhere near the bottom, all we get to see is the topmost brass towers of the city of Pandemonium (‘They like brass here’) from which the oddly loveable little imp Muddlespot – up till now merely one of Pandemonium’s cleaners – is despatched to do his best, or worst, to corrupt the incorruptible Sally Jones, a schoolgirl so Good that her LDC (or Lifetime Deed Counter) reads:

                        Lifetime Good Deeds: 3,971,570

            Lifetime Bad Deeds: NIL nil NIL nil NIL nil NIL nil

Sally Jones is a poster girl for Heaven. Not only is she Good, she is Popular (except possibly with her twin sister Billie: no one likes to be shown up that much, do they?). 

Because, if your phone was out of credit, you could borrow Sally’s.  If you’d left your maths homework at school, you could call Sally and she would give you the questions. …Her allowance wasn’t great, but if you needed any of it, it was yours.  She’d hear your lines for the school play. And when all was lost and the Head of Year was bearing down on you and your last alibi was blown, Sally would get you out of it.  Somehow.  Without even lying.

Not surprising, then, that the angelic squadrons scramble in her defence. And Angel Windleberry (‘no one watched more sleeplessly, praised more mightily or fought the good fight more fiercely’) is chosen to become Sally’s guardian angel and put Muddlespot to flight.

But the Battle for Sally Jones turns out to be a lot more complicated than either Muddle or Win could ever have anticipated. For one thing, Sally’s got her own strong views on things. Then there’s her sister Billie’s guardian angel and resident devil, who’ve … reached a certain understanding.  There’s a war to be fought over a batch of muffins.  There’s an amoral cat.  And anyway, is it really good for Sally to be That Good?  And if not, can Good sometimes be Bad?

If I had one tiny niggle with the book at all, it's the role of the fiend Corozin, Muddlespot's master.  I'm not entirely sure how he fits into Sally's psyche, and he's so hands-off during most of the book that his appearance at the end (as arch tempter) feels something of a diabolus ex machina. But that's all it was, a niggle.  It's a huge relief to come across such an intelligent, thought-provoking book for children.  Give it to good readers of ten and up.  And read it yourself. It's fast-moving, vivid and funny, there’s not a dull line in it, and I adored it. I think you will too. 

Muddle and Win, by John Dickinson, will be published next month by David Fickling Books. 

Fairytale Reflections (12) John Dickinson

John Dickinson’s debut novel ‘The Cup of the World’ was published in 2004 at pretty much the same moment as my own ‘Troll Fell’. You tend to notice the books your first novel arrives in the world with – like picking out the other children in a kindergarten class where your own child has just started. ('Go, little book – and please make friends...') - but I would have noticed this book any time, anywhere.  Besides its intriguing title, ‘The Cup of the World’ had - has - the most gorgeous cover: all storm-lit smoky skies swirling over a great stone-lipped cup rimming a world of cities, lakes and mountains. It begs to be lifted off the shelves.

‘The Cup of the World’ and its sequels ‘The Widow and The King’ and ‘The Fatal Child’ are set in a far-off, war-troubled medieval kingdom. Once, long ago, Wulfram the Seafarer came with his seven sons and conquered the land. Now the different baronies and territories descended from those sons are in turmoil and open revolt, bitter with complex politics and grudges.

The first book follows the fortunes of headstrong Phaedra, visited in dreams by a mysterious knight whom she marries, when finally they meet, in spite of his reputation for black magic... In the second book, Phaedra’s son grows up in exile with his mother, and in the third book he becomes ‘Prince Under the Sky’ – ever wandering as he seeks to undo the curse of Beyah, the weeping goddess of the land.

This is not a fantasy in which things automatically turn out well. Indeed it has the classic feel of a tragedy such as the Morte d’Arthur, in which the good intentions of men and women are overwhelmed by destiny. It’s full of compelling, flawed characters and beautiful, ominous writing. Here Phaedra has found little Ambrose clambering – as toddlers will if unregarded for a moment – up the stone steps to the tower. Then she sees something waiting on the steps above him:

The crouching thing lifted its head. Beneath the hood it seemed eyeless, toad-headed. Something crunched. Flecks of stone trickled down the stair.

Long fingers that were not a man’s stretched towards the child.


“Amba!” she said, louder this time. The boy looked round and saw her. I’m busy, his look said.


If she stepped forward he would turn to climb again. Two steps above him the fingers hovered like the roots of black trees. Water glistened on them. She must not look. She must look at Ambrose. At Ambrose. “Come down, darling. Please – come down.”

John is the son of the author Peter Dickinson, and worked in the Ministry of Defence, Cabinet Office and NATO before leaving the civil service to begin writing. This seems an excellent background for an author whose work is so deeply concerned with the complexities, compromises and betrayals of human relationships, both personal and political. John has also published a historical novel for adults, ‘The Lightstep’, set in a German palatinate at the time of the French Revolution, and a coldly beautiful science fiction novel called ‘WE’, which has recently been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. They are both wonderful. And for his Fairytale Reflection, he has chosen to talk about the fascinations of -

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

 

The cave of wonders!  Torchlight glitters on piles of gems.  It glows on jars of incense, on carpets, cloth, leather and canvas sacks that have split with the weight of coin and cascaded gold and silver across the floor.  There’s pile upon pile of it, more than can possibly be counted, receding into the shadows.   The light trembles.  The hand the holds the torch shudders.  Where did all these things come from?  The men that laid them here are fierce and cruel.  Hanging on hooks among the silks, like a carcass at a market, are the dismembered quarters of an unlucky traveller who was seized and hacked to pieces for daring to enter the cave.  The last drops of his blood still drip to black pools upon the floor.  He died not long ago.  His killers must be close by.  What’s that noise?  Is it sand, trickling in a crevice, or the hiss of indrawn breath?  Is it gold that glitters from the deepest shadows - or is it blades of steel? 

Surprisingly, Ali Baba may not one of the original stories in The Arabian Nights.  Like Sinbad and Aladdin it may have been collected separately by Galland, the eighteenth century French traveller who popularised the Nights in Europe.  But it’s one of my Arabian Nights – the Nights that have been with me since childhood.  It was in the big, colourful, yellow-jacketed hardback book that my parents gave us and through which we entered that fantastic world.  I can still remember the pictures, flat and stylised like Persian miniatures, and the way the robber chief throws up his arm before the cave as he cries “Open Sesame!”

So many stories!  Ali Baba and his slave-girl Morgiana, and thirty-nine thieves dead in their jars of oil.  Aladdin and his lamp.  The Sultan Haroun al Raschid and his vizier Jafaar.  The hunchback and the bone he choked upon.  The brothers Aboukir and Abousir, and the city where the dyers only know how to colour things blue.  Turbans and curling beards and gongs and incense.   Cunning and beauty and terrible cruelty.  This was fantasy, an other world far removed from Western living-rooms, long before Tennyson wrote his Idylls or Tolkein woke our Northern myth from its slumber. 

And Scheherazade herself.  The young woman who, night after night, tells the stories to her husband the Caliph, knowing that if she ever loses his interest she will be executed in the morning like all his other wives before her.  In the sweltering darkness she whispers to him, and he listens with his head propped on silken pillows as she ends one tale and begins another, only to fall silent just as her royal murderer is begging for more.  Young as she is, she has mastered the art of the cliffhanger. 

(I never asked myself, when I had that yellow book in my hands, what else she might have known about amusing men in bed.  Nor did I wonder if the Caliph’s problem with women might have stemmed from some very private little problem of his own, and the reason the stories worked for him was because nothing else was going to.  Sad creature that I am, I can think these things now. )

A thousand stories!  I’m a storyteller myself, and used to being asked about my ideas.  But where did she get all hers from?  Maybe she walked at dawn through in the peacock gardens, her brain dull from fear and lack of sleep, plotting the twists and turns that would keep her alive for one night more.  That story about the sailor went well.  It must be worth a sequel or two.  Is seven pushing it too far? All right, but what’s he going to do on his seven voyages?  (Bird flies by with mouse dead in its claws)  That’s it!  Birds!  Big birds, big enough to feed on elephants!  That’ll make him sit up.  That will get me one more dawn like this.  One more…   

Stories inside stories inside stories.  Scheherazade tells of Jafaar the vizier, who, found wanting by his master Haroun, obtains a pardon for himself by entertaining his Caliph with the Tale of Nur al-Din Ali.  (No harm, you can hear Scheherazade thinking, in planting the idea of mercy in her own Caliph’s head).    The Fisherman tells the Djinn the story of the sage Duban.  Sinbad the Porter hears the story of the seven voyagers from his namesake the Sailor.  It’s like Russian dolls, one inside another inside another, and each decorated and striking, and the myriad of voices that tell them seem to come from all around, echoing inside the cave. 

A thousand and one stories?  Some collections have as many – ancient tales that go back into the folklore of different Middle Eastern cultures, including some about historical figures who lived long after Sheherazade and her Caliph are supposed to have existed.  But most tellings have only a selection.  Ours probably included no more than twenty.  Some I recall very clearly.  Other stories have elements I remember or half-remember, like tricking the djinn back into the bottle, or the book whose pages are poisoned, or the Caliph who enters a house in disguise, is entertained, and nearly loses his life.  I must have read those stories and then forgotten them.  Or maybe I never did, but others like Umberto Eco and James Elroy Flecker did at some time and have served them up to me since, set like gems in stories of their own making.  Running my eye down the list of a thousand titles, I’m surprised to see how few I can recognise.  The Nights were part of my childhood, and yet what I have is only a small proportion of what is there.  They are the piles upon piles of untouched treasures that I left behind me in the cave when I escaped with my little bag of jewels all those years ago.

Picture credit: Scheherezade by Kay Nielsen 1922

Other Worlds (2 ) - Modern writers

Earthsea, Narnia, Middle Earth – the three classic fantasy worlds I talked about last week – are distinctive places. Most children – most people you meet – have a pretty clear picture of at least the last two, and even if they haven’t read the books, will certainly have heard of them. I venture to suggest, as a thought experiment, that if you were dropped at random into one of these worlds you would soon be able to guess which one it was.

There has been a lot of fantasy written since these worlds were created, but not much that competes with them in iconic status and recognisability. Try thinking of names of other worlds, and “Discworld” is the only one that springs readily to my mind. At the border where fantasy and science fiction blur, there may be others – but what in fact are modern writers doing with fantasy worlds? Is sub-creation, as Lewis called it, their primary concern?

Here follows a roundup of some of the ‘other worlds’ I myself have encountered in children’s and YA fiction. I’d be interested to hear of others.

First of all, there are the other worlds which are a slightly different version of our own. An obvious example is Joan Aiken’s wonderful alternative Georgian England – not Georgian at all, of course, because the Stuart kings are still in power, and instead of Bonnie Prince Charlie, we have ‘Bonnie Prince Georgie’ and a whole series of wonderfully bizarre Hanoverian plots to bump off the reigning monarch and put him on the throne. We know we are not going to get historical accuracy, so we play a happy game of follow-my-leader through the wildest places. Pink whales (“Night Birds on Nantucket”), a sinister overweight fairy queen in a South American Welsh colony (“The Stolen Lake”), a plot to roll St Paul’s Cathedral into the Thames in the midst of a royal coronation (“The Cuckoo Tree”), foiled by tent-pegging it down from the back of a galloping elephant… That one initial twist, parting her fantasy world from history, gave Aiken permission to let her imagination loose. And her imagination was powerful, joyous, puckish. Her books are always full of energy, but they can also be eerie, sad. It’s a long walk in the dark/on the blind side of the moon, a character sings in one of her short stories; and it’s a long day without water/when the river’s gone…

Diana Wynne Jones followed Aiken’s lead: many of her books are set in alternative universes that closely parallel our own except for one crucial difference: the existence of magic. Indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that the absence of magic in this world is something of an aberration. Each world diverges from the next in its ‘series’ because of a different outcome to some historical event – Napoleon winning the Battle of Waterloo, for example. Since every author is inspired by others, it wouldn’t be surprising if this had been suggested by Aiken’s books. And the ‘In-Between Place’ in ‘The Lives of Christopher Chant’ owes something in concept, though not in presentation, to Lewis’s ‘Wood Between the Worlds’ in “The Magician’s Nephew”: a neutral, mediumistic jumping-off ground between universes. Again, the main advantage of escaping the confines of our own world and its history is to allow Wynne Jones’ imagination free range, and perhaps also to enable us to consider our own world from an outsider’s point of view. (Handled interestingly in ‘Power of Three’ where the threatening Giants turn out to be, well, us.)

Fascinating, fun, and sometimes thought-provoking though these books are, they are not – and were never intended to be – creations of fantasy worlds in the classic sense. But they share a purpose with the next one I’m coming to: Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’.

Discworld has grown enormously over the series. It began – in “The Colour of Magic” as a spoof, a comic take on sword-and-sorcery novels, with characters like the incompetent wizard Rincewind and the warrior Cohen the Barbarian. It was brilliant comedy, spot on the mark. But Pratchett was too good a writer to remain content with such an easy target. The books rapidly deepened and became more serious of purpose (though still extremely entertaining). Discworld fits the criteria for an instantly recognisable, self-contained imaginary world. It is carried through space by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. It has a consistent geography, with its central mountain range at the Hub, the Ramtops, the city of Ankh-Morpork, the cabbage fields of Sto Lat; its directions (hubwards and rimwards rather than north and south ). There is nowhere quite like it... except that nearly everything in it is a deliberate borrowing from our own Earth, viewed through a slightly distorting fantasy lens that paradoxically allows us to see it rather more clearly. I don’t know of a more passionate advocate than Pratchett for racial and sexual equality. We might be reading about dwarves and trolls, but we’re not fooled. When Commander Vimes employs trolls, werewolves, dwarves, zombies and vampires in the City Watch, it’s not because they all live together in Ankh Morpork like one big happy family. Read ‘Feet of Clay’; read ‘Equal Rites’. Discworld, like the worlds of Aiken and Wynne Jones, sets Pratchett free to say exactly what he wants in a way quite different but not less seriously intended than so-called ‘realistic’ fiction.

But does fantasy have to have a ‘message’? Can’t it just be for entertainment? I wouldn’t like to pronounce on that, but I do think that it has to have a purpose: you have to know why you are writing fantasy and whether, as C.S.Lewis said about children’s fiction, it’s the ‘best medium’ for what you want to say. The charge of ‘escapism’ so often levelled against fantasy, implies that reading and writing fantasy is a frivolous occupation. Even if that were true, I see no reason why it should be disapproved. Plenty of human occupations are frivolous, yet no one objects: popular music, days on the beach, fashion, eating out, good food and wine. Yet many of us who love fantasy feel there is something more to it than this, that at its best it can provide something essential to the spirit. Escape, as either Lewis or Tolkien pointed out, is judged according to what it is you are escaping from. If reading fantasy impairs us for real life, that would be bad, but it’s by no means proven.

Many children and teenagers develop their own private fantasy worlds – perhaps because it’s healthy to stretch the imagination? I had one of my own. Once upon a time I was the imaginary leader of the red horses of the sunset clouds... my name: ‘Red-Gold’. My friend was the leader of the white summer clouds (‘Cloud’); our adversary, the black horses of the thunder. It was obvious enough (and of course I was horse mad), but it gave me a lot of pleasure and sent me off to sleep composing adventures. To give you a feel for the intensity of the thing, here’s a prose poem I wrote when I was twelve:

And out of the mist come horses galloping, born of the wind with wings like to it, dancing and running, plunging through the cool air, out of the golden, out of the glory, straight from the sun as it shines through the mist: dazzling, glorious, horses of the morning, horses of the sunrise, horses of the dawning, shining horses of the steel-blue sky. 

Can’t see it did me any harm at all. But here are three interesting books which study the effects of fantasy worlds built by young people, and ask what purposes they serve for good and for harm.

The first and earliest is ‘Peter’s Room’ by Antonia Forest, published in 1961, part of her series of novels/school stories about the Marlow family which began with ‘Autumn Term’(1948). Forest was a writer who transcended genre, and her well-characterised, insightful stories (now reprinted by Girls Gone By) are well worth attention. In this one, set during the Christmas holidays, the younger Marlows and their friend Patrick begin using an old stable loft (‘Peter’s room’) as their daily meeting-place. Inspired by the Brontë sisters’ Angria and Gondal, they pass the time by inventing an imaginary world with themselves as characters – role-playing, if you like. Gradually, their fantasy characters begin to exert influence on their real lives. It nearly ends in disaster...

Forest was writing with unusual foresight about the seductive power of role-playing (think of Second Life) – but also, the book is about the creative process – the way characters develop lives of their own and often take their authors and creators in unexpected directions. When Patrick’s ‘avatar’ – the heroic sounding ‘Rupert Almeda’ evolves into a traitor and coward, it throws Patrick himself into existential doubt. Is he really Rupert? Who is he? Forest is in no doubt that the process can be extremely dangerous. The reader doesn’t have to follow her all the way, though. It could be argued that role-playing is (usually) a safe way of exploring the possibilities of individuals and relationships. Just so long as it doesn’t take over…

A more playful but no less thoughtful exploration of the subject is Jan Mark’s “They Do Things Differently There” (1994) in which two bored and lonely teenage girls living in a very ordinary new town called Compton Rosehay, form a friendship by inventing an utterly bizarre alternative neighbourhood called ‘Stalemate’. Local landmarks become ‘Lord Tod’s Corpse Depository’ and ‘The Mermaid Factory:

“There is a mermaid factory?”
“You know that big iron barn place at the end of Old Compton Street, just opposite the bus stop at the end of the slip road.”
“Where it says O GLEE...?”
“That’s the place.”
“It’s got petrol pumps outside; I think it used to be a garage.”
“You may think so,” said Elaine, “but remember, here in Stalemate what you see is not necessarily what is there. Earth’s fabric hath worn thin. The real Stalemate is all about us, but we only get occasional glimpses of it. You’ll just have to take it on trust. It’s a mermaid factory.”

In this book, the fantasy world the girls create is the basis of the friendship between them. The book’s a celebration of the delights of invention and imagination, and of the joy of finding someone else with the same sense of humour. In the end, though, as the name suggests, you cannot stay in Stalemate. You have to move on.

The most recent book I know which looks at this subject is “The Traitor Game” (2008) by B.R.Collins. Michael and Francis share an imaginary world called Evgard, involved in bitter civil war, with a city called Arcaster. Michael invented it, and it’s been a refuge from the bullying he endured at his last school. Now Francis has been allowed in.

There was only one other person who knew where Arcaster was; who even knew it existed: Francis. It was as secret, more secret, than a love affair or a drug habit...
And sometimes… when they worked on something together, and ... when both of them were talking about Evgard, arguing, joking, pushing at each other for ideas, Michael felt like he could stretch out his hand and nearly, nearly feel the world of Evgard beyond the real one... He’d catch Francis’s eye when he looked up from his drawing, or hear him say, ‘No, but no, you couldn’t get from Than’s Lynn to Arcaster in two days, it’s winter, you’d have to go the long way round, via Gandet and Hyps,’ and suddenly he’d want to grin like an idiot. It was crazy, they were fifteen, for God’s sake, it wasn’t like they were kids, but here they were inventing a country.

So when Michael believes Francis has betrayed him, his emotions are catastrophic; and the betrayal occurs in Evgard too. This is a dark unflinching book which delves deep into jealousy, cruelty, anger and fear.

All three of these very different books are powerful explorations of friendship and selfhood, and the dark as well as the joyful side of the impulse to create.

And so we move on to wholly self-contained invented worlds. (I’m still excluding Elfland, which seems to me a different kettle of fish, and I’ll explain why some other time.) Some have been created for the sheer delight of experiencing something fantastical and other: but in the best fantasy that is never the be-all and end-all. They still have something to say. Katherine Roberts’ Echorium Sequence is a good example:  it reminds me of the Earthsea books.In the first volume, "Song Quest":

The day everything changed, Singer Graia took Rialle’s class down the Five Thousand Steps to the west beach. They followed her eagerly enough. A Mainlander ship had broken up on the reef in the recent storms, and the Final Years were being allowed out of the Echorium to search for pieces of the wreck.

Already the reader has picked up hints of reservations about the culture which treats a shipwreck as an excuse for a class outing. The task of the Singers on the Island of Echoes is to spread healing and harmony; they are the diplomats of their world, and are able to talk with the Half-Creatures, such as the Merlee who live in the sea and are trawled for by sailors who sell their eggs as delicacies. The boy, Kherron running away and picked up by fishermen, is told:

“You wait right over there with your bucket. When we draw them in, there’ll be lots of wailing and shrieking. Don’t you take no notice. Soon as we toss you one of the fish people, you get right in there with your knife. No need to wait for ‘em to die first. They ain’t got no feelings like we humans do. Got that?”

Kherron does – but soon:

Soon he was surrounded by flapping rainbow tails, coils of silver hair tangled in seaweed, gaping mouths and gills, reaching hands, wet pleading eyes – and those terrible, terrible songs.
“Help us,” they seemed to say.
He shook his head. “I can’t help you,” he whispered... [He] watched his hand fumble in a pool of green slime and closed on the dagger. He began to hum softly. Challa, shh, Challa makes you dream...
The creatures’ struggles grew less violent. One by one their arms and tails flopped to the deck, and their luminous eyes closed. Kherron opened their guts as swiftly as her could and scooped out handfuls of their unborn children. It helped if he didn’t look at their faces. That way he could pretend they were just fish.

This is strong stuff, and Roberts is clearly interested in the differences between a superficial adherence to peace and harmony – the soothing songs of the Singers, the diplomatic missions – and the blood and guts reality that it may not be possible even literally to keep your hands clean. Colourful adventures in imaginary places don’t have to be anodyne: even heroes and heroines may do some very bad things. But in YA fiction, the learning process is usually what counts, and hope is never forgotten.

John Dickinson’s fantasy trilogy – beginning with ‘The Cup of the World’ (2004) – is a more downbeat series. It’s set in a claustrophobic medieval-style kingdom, in a world pictured as held in a vast cup and circled by a snake or cosmic serpent. All of the characters are flawed: civil war is rife, and the main characters are themselves descendants of invaders from over the sea. Long ago, their ancestor Wulfram led his sons against the indigenous hill-people, whose goddess Beyah still weeps for the death of her son. It’s an intricate story which no brief summary can do justice: but the narrative is dark and fatalistic, with a gloom bordering at times on pessimism. This trilogy is a great corrective to the notion that fantasy is all about crude oppositions of good and bad, white and black. The main characters’ best intentions can lead to disaster, and often their intentions are selfish anyway. The descriptions of the world are lovingly detailed and rich, the writing is beautiful, and these are books I greatly admire. They are well worth reading – but not if you happen to be feeling low.

Last, and most recent, Patrick Ness’s trilogy “Chaos Walking” is set on another planet. I haven’t really had time to discuss science fiction, and the border between sci-fi and fantasy is blurred at best. Is this a fantasy trilogy? Why not? There is no reason other than convention why a fantasy world has to be (a) medieval and (b) in some other dimension. The books ask: is there ever an excuse for violence? And there isn’t a clear answer: Todd, the adolescent main character, has a good heart and wants to do the right thing. But, the books ask, how do you know what the right thing is? Can you trust your own judgement? Are people what they seem? Can even first love – the most intense of experiences – sometimes be a selfish excuse for doing harm to others? Like Katherine Roberts’ Kherron, like Antonia Forest’s Patrick, Todd learns that you can’t always keep your hands clean.

I enjoyed “Chaos Walking” immensely, but began to feel towards the end that I could have done with just a little less non-stop, breathless action, and a little more world-building. This is a trilogy which takes the moral choice to the level of a sixty-a-day habit. I loved the first book the best, maybe because there was more leisure to examine Todd and Viola’s (and Manchee’s) surroundings:

The main bunch of apple trees are a little ways into the swamp, down a few paths and over a fallen log that Manchee always needs help to get over…
The leap over the log is where the dark of the swamp really starts and the first thing you see are the old Spackle buildings, leaning out towards you from shadow, looking like melting blobs of tan-coloured ice cream except hut-sized. No one knows or can remember what they were ever s’posed to be…
… I start walking all slow-like up to the biggest of the melty ice-cream scoops. I stay outta the way of anything that might be looking out the little bendy triangle doorway… and look inside.

There are so many other books with fantasy worlds – Susan Cooper’s “Seaward”; Jan Mark’s “The Ennead” and “Riding Tycho”; Sally Prue’s “The Truthsayer” trilogy – but I have run out of space. These titles surely show that modern fantasy writers are still creating all sorts of other worlds for all sorts of different reasons.

So next week I want to go into that a little further. Why do we do it? And what are the pitfalls? When shouldn’t you be writing fantasy?

What’s it all for?