Perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn

In this fabulous picture, Arthur Rackham depicts the beauty, vastness and terror of the sea as a white storm-goddess. There's a shipwreck behind her, and before her, dwarfed on the strand, is a bedraggled mariner who looks as though he very much ought to flee. She's the  embodiment of the terrifying waves we've all been seeing photographed in the news over the last few weeks, like this one from the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25618080

It's at times like these that we're reminded of what our ancestors always knew: the sea is dangerous. We can walk along its edges, we can set out across it in our frail boats; we can even swim and dive in it, but always with a risk.  We don't belong there, we can't live there.  And so we're fascinated by the animals that do: we tell tales about them.  The seals, so like ourselves: warm-blooded breathing mammals - surely they must be magical creatures, to be able to inhabit this place we can't survive in? We follow them in imagination into their strange underwater world. We make myths of mermaids and selkies.

Mermaids and selkies represent the Other – they look like humans but they aren’t, or perhaps they are only half human.  In all the folklore I’ve read about mermaids, they have no souls, and sometimes they mourn this and sometimes they don’t care…  Hans Andersen’s little mermaid will disappear like foam on the sea if she doesn’t win a soul: but when she does gain a soul, she stops being a mermaid.  She becomes a spirit of the air, a sort of angelic Christian spirit – and so in either case she ceases to be, or at least loses her identity...

Most mermaid stories are sad.  Some mermaids are actively dangerous. One Greek legend tells of a giant mermaid who rises out of the sea to demand of passing ships, ‘What news of King Alexander?’  Unless she receives the response, ‘He lives, and reigns, and conquers the world!’ she wrecks the ship in her fury.  So mermaids are also a metaphor for the beauty and danger of the sea, which has the power to wreck ships and take men’s lives.  There’s a lot going on in mermaid stories.

All fiction is affected by contemporary concerns.  Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ was concerned with salvation because he wrote in a highly Christian century.  Nowadays, in our multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-everything society, I think writing about mermaids offers an opportunity to explore issues of trust and communication between individuals who may look different from one another, who may appear to come from different worlds.   What is it to be ‘human’?  How do we define it?  How do we recognise similarities and reconcile differences?  In very different ways, Liz Kessler’s 'Emily Windsnap' books and Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ and its sequels explore these questions, as well as issues of pollution and climate change. In 'Ingo', merfolk and humans were once one people, who have diverged and now live in separate worlds - except that each race still impacts the other.  Liz Kessler's 'Emily Windsnap' is a little girl who herself bridges the gap: her father is mer, her mother human.  To which world does she belong?  Is it always necessary to choose?

And what about the original legends, such as the Cornish Mermaid of Zennor or the Scottish selkie and kelpie stories?  The legends are tremendously inspiring - but you have to think about them, find out what they are saying to you.  I wrote about the selkies, the shape-shifting seal people, in ‘Troll Mill’, the second part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’.  The legend is of a fisherman who sees the selkies dancing on the moonlit beach in the form of lovely women, and he snatches up one of their discarded sealskins so that the selkie girl can’t escape into the sea.  She has to marry him and bear his children, but one day she finds where he’s hidden the sealskin.  At once she throws it on, returns to the sea and abandons him and her human (half-human?) children forever.

For me, this legend seemed to be about the difficulty of understanding one another, even in a bond as close as marriage – in a sense, one’s partner is always the Other.  It speaks of the power struggle between couples – and the grief of a failed partnership – and, very strongly I thought, about the new mother’s plunge into post-natal depression.  And that was how I used it in my book, though keeping the magic and lyricism. In my short mermaid book ‘Forsaken’, the human-mer partnership is the other way around, based on an old Scandinavian ballad about a Mer-king who marries a mortal woman, and one day she hears the church bells ringing above the sea, and goes back to the land and leaves him forever.  Rarely in folklore do these stories end happily.  But I read the legend, and my spine tingled, and I wanted to see what would happen if one of the half-mer children went looking for her mother…  Would the ending be different?

Margo Lanagan, in ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ (Australian title 'Sea Hearts') has found something quite different in the selkie legends (see her post and my review).  In her book, the seals are  manipulated and transformed in a way which denies their nature and damages the wrongdoers.  It’s a marvellous book which will keep me thinking for – I suspect – years.  The beautiful women who step out of the seal carcasses appear, to the rough island men who have obtained them like mail-order brides, to be the culmination of delight: but they and their sons must live year in, year out, bearing the guilt of the seal women’s ever-present mild but steadfast grief.

Franny Billingsley’s ‘The Folk Keeper’ is another story which is concerned with questions of identity and belonging, a wonderfully creepy take on the selkie legend.  And Gillian Philip’s ‘Firebrand’ and ‘Bloodstone’ include not only selkies, as sinister death-omens, but her heroes of the Sithe, the Scottish faeries, ride kelpies too (water horses from the lochs): sleek and dangerous and man-eating.  Kelpies appear again in Maggie Stiefvater’s wonderful ‘The Scorpio Races’, an evocative and thrilling story of racing the savage water horses on a wild Scottish island.  Should men take and attempt to tame these otherworldly creatures?  Is it courage or cruelty?  Should they, perhaps, be left to their own world and their own nature?

These are all strong, wonderfully written books.  If you feel like taking a plunge into the perilous seas of fairyland, do try them!  And on Friday, the blog will continue to explore the selkie theme with a guest post from Laura Marjorie Miller.

 

The Perilous Seas of Faeryland

 'The Little Mermaid', Arthur Rackham

Are 'mermaid books' a genre? There’ve been plenty of mermaid stories published in the last six to eight years – Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ series and Liz Kessler’s lovely ‘Emily Windsnap’ titles spring instantly to mind: but they've been too different to be connected or viewed as a genre – certainly not in the same way that vampire or werewolf stories have. This is no bad thing.  For even though what seems to be a sudden fashion is often no more than a different way of joining up the dots, I’ve got a feeling that mermaids (and their underwater kin the selkies and kelpies) offer more various kinds of opportunity to the writer than the biting of throats and sucking of blood.  Subtler, more lyrical.  A different world.

Mermaids and selkies represent the Other – they look like humans but they aren’t, or perhaps they are only half human.  In all the folklore I’ve read about mermaids, they have no souls, and sometimes they mourn this and sometimes they don’t care…  Hans Andersen’s little mermaid will disappear like foam on the sea if she doesn’t win a soul: but when she does gain a soul, she stops being a mermaid.  She becomes a spirit of the air, a sort of angelic Christian spirit – and so in either case she ceases to be, or at least loses her identity... Plus, mermaids and selkies physically inhabit a place we can’t survive in, the world of the sea: so to write a book about mermaids is to take the reader on an imaginative journey into a different world. 

Most mermaid stories are sad.  Some mermaids are actively dangerous. (One legend tells of a giant mermaid who rises out of the sea to demand of passing ships, ‘What news of King Alexander?’  Unless she receives the response, ‘He lives, reigns, and conquers the world!’ she wrecks the ship in her fury.)  So mermaids are also a metaphor for the beauty and danger of the sea, which has the power to wreck ships and take lives. There’s a lot going on in mermaid stories.

For me this sombre illustration by Arthur Rackham suggests the danger of desiring the Other

All fiction is affected by contemporary concerns.  Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ was concerned with salvation because he wrote in a highly Christian century.  Nowadays, in our multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-everything society, I think writing about mermaids offers an opportunity to explore issues of trust and communication between individuals who may look different from one another, who may appear to come from different worlds. What is it to be ‘human’? How do we define it?  How do we recognise similarities and reconcile differences?  In very different ways, Liz Kessler’s 'Emily Windsnap' books and Helen Dunmore’s ‘Ingo’ and its sequels explore these questions, as well as issues of pollution and climate change. In 'Ingo', merfolk and humans were once one people, who have diverged and now live in separate worlds - except that each race still impacts the other. Liz Kessler's 'Emily Windsnap' is a little girl who herself bridges the gap: her father is mer, her mother human. To which world does she belong?  Is it always necessary to choose?

And what about the original legends, such as the Cornish Mermaid of Zennor or the Scottish selkie and kelpie stories?  The legends are tremendously inspiring - but you have to think about them, find out what they are saying to you.  I wrote about the selkies, the shape-shifting seal people, in ‘Troll Mill’, the second part of my trilogy ‘West of the Moon’.  The legend is of a fisherman who sees the selkies dancing on the moonlit beach in the form of lovely women, and he snatches up one of their discarded sealskins so that the selkie girl can’t escape into the sea.  She has to marry him and bear his children, but one day she finds where he’s hidden the sealskin.  At once she throws it on, returns to the sea and abandons him and her human (half-human?) children forever. 

For me, this legend seemed to be about the difficulty of understanding one another, even in a bond as close as marriage – in a sense, one’s partner is always the Other.  It speaks of the power struggle between couples – and the grief of a failed partnership – and, very strongly I thought, about the new mother’s plunge into post-natal depression.  And that was how I used it in my book, though keeping the magic and lyricism. In my short mermaid book ‘Forsaken’, the human-mer partnership is the other way around, based on an old Scandinavian ballad about a Mer-king who marries a mortal woman, and one day she hears the church bells ringing above the sea, and goes back to the land and leaves him forever.  Rarely in folklore do these stories end happily.  But I read the legend, and my spine tingled, and I wanted to see what would happen if one of the half-mer children went looking for her mother…  Would the ending be different?

Margo Lanagan, in ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’, has found something quite different in the selkie legends (see her post and my review).  In her book, the seals are used, manipulated, transformed, in a way which denies their nature and damages the wrongdoers. It’s a marvellous book which will keep me thinking for – I suspect – years. The beautiful women who step out of the seal carcasses appear, to the rough island men who have obtained them like mail-order brides, to be the culmination of delight: but they and their sons live with the guilt of the seal women’s ever-present mild but steadfast grief.

Franny Billingsley’s ‘The Folk Keeper’ is another story which is concerned with questions of identity and belonging, a wonderfully creepy take on the selkie legend.  And Gillian Philip’s ‘Firebrand’ and ‘Bloodstone’ include not only selkies, as sinister death-omens, but her heroes of the Sithe, the Scottish faeries, ride kelpies too (water horses from the lochs): sleek and dangerous and man-eating.  Kelpies appear again in Maggie Stiefvater’s wonderful ‘The Scorpio Races’, an evocative and thrilling story of racing the savage water horses on a wild Scottish island.  Should men take and attempt to tame these otherworldly creatures?  Is it courage or cruelty?  Should they, perhaps, be left to their own world and their own nature?

These are all strong, and wonderfully written books.  If you feel like taking a plunge into the perilous seas of fairyland, do try them!

"Knitting With Seaweed": Margo Lanagan on Selkies

Margo Lanagan is my guest today to talk about selkies and the inspiration for her book 'The Brides of Rollrock Island'. 


I can't remember where I first heard about selkies. I feel as if I've always known about them, though, so it must have been early, in some collection of fairytales or folklore borrowed from the Raymond Terrace Library in the sixties.

A Selkie Story artwork copyright © Kate Leiper 2009
www.kateleiper.co.uk

At any rate, when I picked up some strange seaweed-like knitting-wool in a discount store a few years ago, and wondered what it would be like to knit actual seaweed, and why a person would be even trying to do so, selkies presented themselves as the most likely reason behind it. I thought at first that the seaweed blankets were more like nets; the husbands threw them over their wives to keep them on land, when the women got desperate and tried to return to the sea; they were a means of entrapment. (So even in the first stages, I envisaged all my selkies as women.) But in the end I made them more like security blankets, under which the selkies lay and brooded and wept, consoled by the sea-smell.

Selkie stories are all very sad, and even the ones that end well have a poignancy; a selkie mother may come and dance every year with her children on Midsummer Eve, but what about the rest of the year's yearning? What about the lovelorn husband left behind?

Against this incurable sorrow, this irreconcilable difference and distance between the loved ones, is always set the spellbinding beauty of selkies, whether they be male or female. It's never worth what is sacrificed for a land-person to claim this beauty, but they are helpless to resist it. Part of the attraction of writing The Brides of Rollrock Island was to communicate that rather terrifying beauty, the alienness of it as well as its allure.

Part of it, too, was to counteract wafty Celtic Twilight interpretations of the selkie tales. I wanted blunt, practical people to fall, improbably, for the selkies; I wanted the selkie-coats to smell strongly and to be heavy and slippery and hard to manage and a problem to store and keep secret; I wanted the full unnaturalness of the process to be pointed up, and the full misery of the situation to be admitted. Selkies' passivity in the face of their imprisonment on land seems to me a dreadful thing that's often camouflaged by their beauty, and the attractively melancholy picture they present, wandering longingly beside the sea - and in this way, the men who love them are always, always let off the hook for the injury they've caused the selkie, and in turn their children. I think I wanted to make them more accountable, and to make them see what they'd done and feel remorse; I wanted to focus on their loss and their children's, rather than just be dazzled by the wonderment of a beauty's emerging from the sea, instead of the expected monster.

But probably the thing that excited me the most about writing a selkie tale was the necessity to enter into the experience of the change, the sensations (mental and physical) involved in the transformation from seal to person or person to seal, the sights and sounds and emotions involved in witnessing such a change. I've written several stories from animals' points of view, and I thought it would be an absorbing challenge to try to maintain the other-species foreignness of the seals even as they became almost-credible humans. I wanted to get up close to the actual skin-shedding, or to the first swimming-twitches as the selkie returned to seal form; I wanted it to be a clumsy, heavy process as well as a magical one.

Retelling folk and fairytales, you always start from the powerful bare bones of the story that have lasted through the ages; I wanted my story to grow a thick layer of seal fat and muscle and cover itself in tight, slick sealskin, to have it thrash around in an ungainly way on land, forever longing to take flight in the sea. No amount of magic should be allowed to diminish real seals in all their weight and agility, in their eerie likeness to us, yet their utter unknowability.

"The Brides of Rollrock Island" by Margo Lanagan, David Fickling Books

Many thanks Margo!  You can follow Margo on Twitter, or read her own blog Among Amid Awhile

"The Brides of Rollrock Island" by Margo Lanagan

Of all the underwater peoples, the selkies – the seal people – have the closest connection with human beings.  You’ve only to go out in a small boat anywhere around the north coast of Britain, to see the grey seals poking their curious round heads out of the waves, to see them sprawling on the rocks, and to meet their dark, expressive eyes. They exist – unarguably, incontrovertibly – in a way which mermaids and sirens don’t.

And they come out on land, and they suckle their young in a very human fashion: no wonder, then, that legends of selkies sprang up – of how the grey seals could cast off their skins and come dancing on moonlit beaches in the form of beautiful young men and women. 

Especially women.

But the stories about selkies never have happy endings. If mermaid stories are often concerned with the mermaid’s lack of an immortal soul, selkie tales are about capture and imprisonment, abandonment and loss.  They are about the changing balance of power within a relationship.  They are about depression and grief.

Margo Lanagan’s utterly wonderful book ‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ explores all these themes.  It’s set in a tiny, almost incestuous fishing community, so isolated (I’m reminded that isolated literally means islanded) that the opinion of family and neighbours is the opinion of the world. And it’s a place which the humans share with a population of seals.

Misskaella Prout is unhappy.  Plump, ungainly and difficult, the youngest of several children, butt of many a family joke and sisterly unkindness, one day she wakes to find in herself a terrifying but transforming power over the seals. She can see sparks and seeds of humanity within them, and stir them into growth: she creates for herself a beautiful man who steps out of his bull seal carcass to make love to her.

Even this transient encounter has tragic and unforeseeable results; but gradually word of Misskaella’s powers gets about, and one by one the men of the village begin coming to her to ask her to provide them with seal brides.  

Including the men who already have wives and children.

Margo Lanagan's writing is astoundingly good.  It's physical and shocking and brilliant, like reading poetry by Ted Hughes, except in prose. Everything is distinct, clearly imagined - especially the moment of transformation, the human birth, the moment when the sealskins split, unzip, and out of that blubbery fleshy darkness step the slender and beautiful seal girls.  But are they really human?  To the men, the seal brides are the perfect women: meek, beautiful, domestic – but even the men become gradually, uncomfortably aware of the deep, helpless sadness of their chosen mates.  A great wrong has been done to them.

As years pass, the story is taken up by a succession of voices. Bitter, complicated Misskaella, naïve, well-meaning Dominic Mallett, and finally young Daniel Mallett, whose own mother is a seal bride – each has a different view of the tragedy which is being enacted and perpetuated on Rollrock Island.

‘The Brides of Rollrock Island’ is about greed, and injustice, and the unforeseen consequences of getting what you think you want. It’s about the shamefaced, pathetic gestures by which the guilty attempt to palliate crimes which they have no intention of redressing.  It’s about seeing the world through a distorting lens and telling yourself you can see straight, it’s about self-deception – and, finally, salvation.

'The Brides of Rollrock Island' by Margo Lanagan is published in the UK in hardcover by David Fickling Books.

And on Wednesday, Margo Lanagan will be a guest here on the blog, with much more to say about selkies and the background to her marvellous book!  

 

 Photograph: Joe Cornish/NTPL

Fairytale heroines

Heroines, you will note, not ‘fairytale princesses’. For though princesses do figure in fairytales, the heroine is just as often a peasant – or a farmer’s daughter – or perhaps the child of a powerful magician. Even in the so-called Classic Fairytales, the ones which have been anthologised and Disneyfied almost to death, Sleeping Beauty and Snow-White are princesses, yes. But Cinderella and Beauty are merchant’s daughters; Red Riding Hood is an ordinary little girl; Rapunzel is a peasant woman’s child; the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin is a miller’s daughter – and so on.

There’s a widespread notion that fairytales present a very passive picture of women and are dreadful role-models for little girls. This is due to ignorance. Many people who do not actually read fairytales, or have not read any since childhood, vaguely associate them with a picture of a Barbie-blonde lady wearing a pink silk dress and diamonds, lying on a bed in a tower, awaiting rescue from a prince on a white horse, and ‘love’s first kiss’. Like this illustration by Rene Cloke from ‘My First Book of Fairy Tales’, which I was given as a child.

Sleeping Beauty herself may not be a brilliant role model. But though the Freudians among us are no doubt correct about the story’s underlying imagery (the tower, the young girl’s awakening to sexuality, etc), for me what really makes the tale stand out is the arresting of time within the castle walls. There’s beauty and terror there: the whole little jewelled world frozen and forgotten, like Pompei under its ash, for a hundred years. (There are other tales of unearthly sleepers, like King Arthur’s knights under their hill, who still haven’t woken.) No one, to my mind – not even Robin McKinley in ‘Spindle’s End’, and certainly not the Disney film – has yet retold ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in a way which does the story justice: because nobody can find a way to dramatise that hundred years of sleep. And what’s the point of the Sleeping Beauty if she sleeps for only a few hours? My own daughters have regularly done better than that.

Getting back to heroines: fairytale heroines to me do not signal passivity and helplessness. Far more often they exhibit resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, courage – even ruthlessness. Cinderella does get to the ball, and in some of the earlier versions she is not helped by a fairy godmother, but by the hazel tree planted on her mother’s grave, suggesting that the strength and riches she finds come from within, from her own heredity. Beauty, of Beauty and the Beast, is braver than her father (seen here losing his wig in fright at the beast's approach).  Beauty ventures alone into the Beast’s castle and learns to distinguish the true worth behind his ugliness. (And yes – Freudian deconstruction says this too is all about the awakening of sexuality. But really, wouldn’t you rather have the story than the moral?) In the original tale, the Beast treats Beauty from the beginning with melancholy courtesy: she has no need to teach him manners as in the cartoon.

And what about the many, many heroines of less well-known tales? What about Mollie Whuppie, abandoned in the woods by her parents, whose quick wits defeat a giant and win the hand of three princes in marriage for her and her two sisters? Or Kate Crackernuts, who, when her own mother conjures a sheep’s head on to her prettier stepsister’s shoulders, takes ‘a fine linen cloth and wrapped it around her sister’s head and took her by the hand and they both went out to seek their fortune.’ They come to a king’s castle ‘who had two sons, and one of them was sickening away to death, and no one could find out what ailed him.’ Kate offers her services, and when the prince rises at midnight she follows him into a green hill where he dances all night with the fairies until he drops from exhaustion. By persistence, courage, and intelligence, Kate manages to cure both the prince and her sister, and: ‘The sick son married the well sister and the well son married the sick sister, and they all lived and died happy and never drank out of a dry cappy.’ Katherine Briggs wrote a full length novel based on this tale – ‘Kate Crackernuts’ – and very good it is, too.

Then there’s the Norwegian fairytale ‘The Master-Maid’ in which the prince would be eaten by the troll to whom he has pledged his work, were it not for the wisdom and power of the ‘Master-Maid’ who lives in the troll’s house. The prince succeeds at each perilous task only by following the Master-Maid’s advice. Finally the troll orders the Master-Maid to kill the prince and cook him, but the Master-Maid cuts her finger and lets three drops of blood fall. Then, as the troll sleeps, she escapes with the prince and a great deal of magical treasure; and when the troll awakes to demand if the meal is cooked, the drops of blood answer for her: ‘Not yet,’ ‘Nearly’, and ‘It is boiled dry’.

The troll pursues the couple, but the Master-Maid flings magical impediments in his path which change into mountains and seas. In the end, prince and Master-Maid are married, but not without a further development in which the prince forgets her, and is rescued on the verge of marrying the wrong woman…

Clearly, in this kind of story, women are more than matches for men. The fact that the happy ending is nearly always marriage does not invalidate the energy and determination of these heroines. Marriage-with-the-prince is a metaphor for success in life. These tales aren’t telling us to wish for Prince Charming and a life of idle luxury. They are telling us to be active, to use our wits, to be undaunted, to see what we want and to go for it.

In one of my favourite English fairytales, ‘Mr Fox’, a version of ‘Bluebeard’, the heroine Lady Mary may be initially taken in by the sly flattery of her suitor, but she is inquisitive and brave as well as rich and beautiful, discovers for herself the bloody secrets of Mr Fox’s castle, and turns the tables on him in the neatest and most self-possessed of ways. The story quite definitely approves of female curiosity and courage; without these qualities, the heroine would have joined the list of this serial killer’s victims. There is no marriage at all at the end of the tale, and one feels Lady Mary will give the next suitor a very hard look indeed.

Downtrodden heroines more often rescue themselves than they are rescued. The heroine of the story variously known as ‘Donkeyskin’, ‘Ashiepattle’, ‘Allerleirauh’, or ‘Cap o’ Rushes’ has to flee her father’s house either because, like Cordelia in ‘King Lear’, she has given what he considers insufficient proof of filial affection, or in some versions because she is the spitting image of her dead mother and he has incestuously decided to marry her. (Robin McKinley wrote a magnificent version of this tale: ‘Deerskin’; to my mind even better than Margo Lanagan's recent 'Tender Morsels'.) Disguised in extraordinary shabby clothes, a donkey skin, a coat made of all kinds of different furs, or a cloak made of rushes, she sets out for another kingdom and finds rough work in the palace kitchens, thereby demonstrating independence and resilience. On seeing the prince or heir of the house, she obtains his attention by a series of tricks (mysterious appearances at dances; golden rings dropped in winecups) and finally marries him. I call it enterprising.

Many are the heroines who get the better of the Devil himself (this dark gentleman rarely does well in folktales.) Remember the farmer who sells his soul in return for twenty years of good harvests? And when the time comes to pay up, his clever wife saves him. “My man won’t be a minute, sir, he’s just getting his things together, and please take a mouthful to eat while you wait!” she calls to the Devil, handing him a pie into which she has baked a red-hot griddle. When he bites into it, burning his tongue and breaking his teeth, she interrupts his howls with the merry cry, “And I’m coming too, to cook for you both!” – at which the terrified Devil takes to his heels. Of course it’s comical: but note that the farmer’s wife employs her wits and her skills, and defeats the Devil in a particularly feminine way.

Alison Lurie, in ‘Don’t Tell the Grownups’ (Bloomsbury, 1990) points out that ‘Gretel, not Hansel, defeated the witch’, and adds, ‘In the Grimms’ original ‘Household Tales’ (1812), there are sixty-one women and girl characters who have magic powers as against only twenty-one men and boys: and these men are usually dwarfs and not humans.’ Compared to the ‘classic’ children’s literature which I wrote about last week, in which only 12 out of 66 titles featured girls as the main character, this is pretty impressive.

When the king’s daughter saw there was no hope of turning her father’s heart, she resolved to run away. In the night when everyone was asleep, she got up and took three different things from her treasures, a golden ring, a golden spinning wheel, and a golden reel. The three dresses of sun, moon and stars she placed into a nutshell, put on her mantle of all kinds of fur, and blackened her face and hands with soot. Then she commended herself to God and went away.

('Allerleirauh': in which the princess saves herself from an incestuous marriage and wins a prince.)

The maiden went forth into the wide world to search for her brothers and set them free, cost what it might. And now she went onwards, far, far, to the very end of the world. Then she came to the sun, but it was too hot and terrible, and devoured little children. Hastily she ran away, and ran to the moon, but it was far too cold, and also awful and malicious, and when it saw the child it said, “I smell, I smell the flesh of men.” …So the maiden went onwards until she came to the Glass Mountain…

('The Seven Ravens': in which the princess saves her long lost enchanted brothers.)

When they [father and daughter] had dug nearly the whole of the field, they found in the earth a mortar made of pure gold. ‘Listen,’ said the father to the girl, ‘as our lord the King has graciously given us this field, we ought to give him this mortar in return for it.’ ‘Father,’ said the daughter, ‘if we have the mortar without having the pestle as well, we shall have to get the pestle, so you had much better say nothing about it.’ But he would not obey her, and carried the mortar to the king…

('The Peasant’s Wise Daughter': the daughter’s wit and courage saves her father and wins marriage with the king – whom she later kidnaps to teach him a much-needed lesson.)

The heroines in these tales know their own minds and make their own decisions. They are wise, prudent, determined, wily and brave. They are so far from the stereotype of the fairytale princess that one has to ask how it arose, and to wonder whether late 19th/early 20th century editorial bias – to say nothing of rewriting – had anything to do with choosing more ‘properly behaved’ heroines for children’s anthologies?

Disturbing Stories

There was a bit of controversy at this year’s Edinburgh Festival when Anne Fine was quoted or misquoted about her views on the suitability of certain themes for children’s fiction. She appeared to be suggesting that gritty realism and downbeat endings could be taken too far, and might have an adverse effect on young minds.

I wasn’t there, and didn’t hear her exact words. As Anne Fine is herself the author of the splendid but pretty disturbing book, ‘The Tulip Touch’, I expect that what she actually said was more finely nuanced than the reports suggested. And she was probably talking about teen books anyway – Margo Lanagan’s ‘Tender Morsels’ had just come out with its themes of incest and rape. I did read ‘Tender Morsels’: it was beautifully written, and far less shocking – and much more of a fairytale – than advertised.

I don’t have a problem with gritty realism – or gritty fairytales either – and as far as teenagers are concerned, I think from the age of 14 or so, most young people are capable of dealing with fiction that expresses the harsher and crueller aspects of life as well as beauty, adventure and love. In any case, there’s a wide range of books available. If one story doesn’t please, another will. Even ‘Tender Morsels’ is unlikely to keep a healthy teenager awake at night.

For junior fiction, the situation is different. Authors are not teachers or pastors; we have no mission to instruct or to impart morals; but in practice most authors who write for younger children do present a broadly hopeful view of life in which good usually triumphs over adversity and evil. Part of the reason for this is that younger children are more impressionable.

Everyone enjoys being a little frightened. Toddlers giggle when you pretend to drop them. Eight year olds hide behind the sofa to watch Dr Who. A controllable degree of fright is fun. Cold terror is not, and most parents know what it’s like to have to try to deal – at one o-clock in the morning – with a hysterical child who can’t sleep for thinking about some frightening moment in a film or a story.

If only it were possible to predict what is too scary and what is not! But it isn’t possible. Children are too different. I knew one seven year old who was terrified by the Wicked Witch of the West in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and another who could watch ‘Jurassic Park’ with complacent indifference. So which film is family viewing for seven year olds and which is not? Neither?

When I was 5 or 6, I had an Enid Blyton picturebook about Noddy, in which Noddy took his little car for a drive through the woods. You turned the page, and a goblin jumped out at him. The picture was black and white, and somehow horribly startling. It reduced me to helpless screams, and the book had to be taken away. Then, memorably, when I was about eight or nine, and horse-and-pony mad, I was given a Puffin book called ‘Snow Cloud Stallion’. On the front cover was a gorgeous, romantic picture of a white stallion sliding to a halt in a cloud of mist, framed against a background of dour pine trees. The story was about a boy who tames a wild horse, and there was a sub-plot about cattle rustlers. I plunged in and read eagerly till I reached a point in the story where the boy discovers the discarded skins of the slaughtered cattle.

And that was that. I was terrified. I couldn’t finish the book; I couldn’t even be in the same room as the book. My mother had to spirit it away. I wouldn’t let her throw it out because I loved the picture on the front cover so much; but I was too frightened of the book to able to look at it or even hold it. (She hid it on top of her wardrobe; I knew it was there, but the fact that it was in her room somehow neutralised it for me.) In the end, she had a go at hand-copying the picture for me, and then I presume she got rid of it. At any rate, it disappeared, and I never saw it again.

And then, just this weekend, in a second-hand bookshop in Stratford upon Avon, I found it again, and bought it for old times’ sake, and out of curiosity. How bad WAS that passage that had scared me so much? Would I still find it disturbing today?

Judge for yourselves:

“There lay the heifer – what was left of her. It took [Ken] several minutes to quiet the jumpy horse, unnerved by the scent of blood which must have reached him just before Ken caught sight of the slaughtered animal.
“It was an unpleasant sight. The hind-quarters were missing and the limp, bloodstained hide lay grotesquely empty. The flies were already buzzing around it in swarms. Ken could see a black hole in the forehead where the bullet had struck. The thieves must have used a silencer.”

Looking at this edition, Kaye Webb’s Puffin imprint of 1967, I see the book (by Gerald Raftery) was first published in 1953. The blurb says ‘A fine story that all children who like horses will enjoy; girls and boys over ten will, we hope, read it with equal enthusiasm.’ So perhaps I was a little young for it after all. I have to say I still find the passage raises the ghost of a frisson. But I don’t think an adult could easily have predicted the passionate terror those few sentences produced in me.

And so I wonder… do you have any frightening stories?