Fairytale Reflections (5) Kate Forsyth

One of the very best things about having started this blog – almost a year ago now – is the friends I’ve made because of it. One of these is the Australian fantasy writer Kate Forsyth, who emailed me way back in February to say she thought we might have a lot in common – and do we just!


For a start, I discovered that Kate, whose books until then I’d unaccountably not picked up although I’d seen them everywhere – had read and loved almost the identical set of childhood books that I had. It was as if we had been leading parallel reading lives, on opposite sides of the globe. She sent me her book ‘The Puzzle Ring’ (which I reviewed here) and I was swept away not only by the drive of the narrative and the delicate strength of the writing, which reminded me of Elizabeth Goudge’s children’s fiction, but by the deep knowledge Kate has of British folk-and-fairylore. Who but Kate would send the Blue Men of the Minch to endanger her heroine on a perilous sea crossing? Or give us a glimpse of the terrifying Nuckelavee in a throng of the faery folk under the hill –

One of the most awful sights was a creature like a centaur, except that it had no skin. Hannah could clearly see the knotted muscles and blue, pumping veins running all over its body. The man-figure upon its back carried a spear in its long, skinless arms, which it beat in time to the jester’s song.

If there’s anything better than discovering an author with whose books one is utterly in tune, it’s discovering a friend, ditto. With a happy sigh, I sat back to read my way through Kate’s books – which will take a while, since she’s the bestselling author of over twenty titles. Her first book was named a Best First Novel of 1998 by Locus Magazine, and since then she’s been shortlisted for many awards, including a CYBIL Award in the US and the Surrey Book of the Year award in Canada. In 2007, five of her Chain of Charms series were jointly awarded the 2007 Aurealis Award for Children’s Fiction.


When Kate came to London this year in the early summer, we were able to meet – and talked nineteen to the dozen for the entire afternoon about faeries, folklore and fantasy. And so I feel as though I’m only continuing that conversation as I step back to allow her to tell you about a fairytale with much personal resonance for her, which is the basis of her next (adult) novel. It is the fairytale of –


RAPUNZEL

Rapunzel is one of the most mysterious and enduring of all fairytales, telling the story of a young girl sold to a witch by her parents for a handful of bitter green herbs. 

The witch locked her in a tower deep in the forest and visited her by commanding, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so I may climb the golden stair’. One day a prince, entranced by Rapunzel’s singing, called up the same rhyme to the imprisoned girl who lowered her hair to him. He climbed up to her room and they fell in love at first sight. Before the prince can help her escape, the witch discovers their tryst and banishes Rapunzel to the wilderness where she gives birth to twins (who are later cut from the story by the Grimm Brothers who found the babies hard to explain to a young audience). The prince is cast down from the tower and blinded by thorns, but Rapunzel finds him and her tears miraculously heal his eyes so they can live happily ever after. 

I have been fascinated by the Rapunzel tale ever since I was a child myself, and I am now working on a novel called Bitter Greens which retells the fairytale as a historical novel set in Venice and northern Italy in the 17^th century and France in the 18^th century. 

When I was two years old, I was savaged by a dog and ended up with terrible head injuries that resulted in meningitis (infection of the membranes that surround the brain) and encephalitis (a life-threatening inflammation of the brain). I was very ill for months, spending most of that year in hospital and ending with dreadful scars all over my head (thankfully most of them are hidden by my hair). I had half of one ear torn off and my left tear duct was destroyed, and with it my ability to control my tears. My eye wept all the time. 

As a result, I was in and out of hospital for the next six or seven years, half-blind and racked with fever. I used to lie in my hospital bed, all alone in an empty children’s ward at the Sydney Eye Hospital, staring with my one good eye out the window. All I could see was a high green hill, crowned with an ancient Moreton Bay fig tree and the sandstone wall of the Art Gallery of NSW. It looked like a castle. I used to imagine myself galloping away over the hill, on my way to marvellous adventures. 

I think my fascination with Rapunzel began with my own entrapment in that lonely hospital ward. Again and again I write about people imprisoned in towers and dungeons, longing to be rescued. It is a recurring motif in my novels, most recently in my fantasy adventure for children, The Wildkin’s Curse, which tells the story of a wildkin princess kept captive in an impossibly tall crystal tower, telling stories to try and free herself.

I love the story of Rapunzel because of the ardent love affair between the imprisoned girl and the prince who rescues her, and because of the miraculous healing of the prince’s eyes by Rapunzel’s tears. Rapunzel begins as a powerless child-like victim but by the end of the story she has become a magical agent of healing and redemption. 

Most people think that Rapunzel was first told by the Grimm Brothers in the early 19^th century, but in fact it is a much older story than that. 

There are numerous Maiden in Tower stories in cultures all around the world, so many it has its own classification in the Aarne-Thompson fairytale motif index, Type 310. The first may well be from Christian iconography, with the story of Saint Barbara, a virtuous young girl locked in a tower by her father in the 3^rd century. She was tortured for her beliefs, but all her wounds were miraculously healed overnight and in the end she was beheaded by her own father, who was then struck by lightning and killed. 

The very first time the motif of the ‘hair ladder’ appeared in a fairy story was in a 10^th century Persian tale told by Ferdowsi (932-1025 AD), in which a woman in a harem offers to lower her hair to her lover, Zal, so he can climb up to her. He is afraid he might hurt her and so throws up a rope instead. 

The ‘hair ladder’ reappears in the story, Petrosinella, in the mid 17^th century, as part of a collection of literary fairy tales told by a Florentine writer, Giambattista Basile. His collection, Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), was first published in 1634-36 and told the story of a princess who could not laugh. Various storytellers gathered to tell her stories in the hope they can amuse her, including one who tells the story of a girl, Petrosinella (Little Parsley), who is given up to an ogress after her mother steals parsley from the ogress’s garden. The ogress locks Petrosinella up in a tower in the forest, using her hair as a ladder to access the building. Petrosinella escapes with the help of a prince who heard her singing, overcoming the ogress by casting three magical acorns behind her that turn into obstacles that impede the witch and ultimately devour her. 

Sixty years later, the story appears again, this time in France. It is told by a woman writer, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, who has been banished to a convent after displeasing the king, Louis XIV, at his glittering court in Versailles. Locked away in a cloister, much like Rapunzel is in her tower, Charlotte-Rose was among the first writers to pen a collection of literary fairy tales and one of the world’s first historical novelists. Published under a pseudonym, Madame X, Charlotte-Rose’s tales became bestsellers and she was eventually able to buy her release.

In Persinette, her version of the tale, the mother conceives an insatiable longing for parsley which her husband steals for her from a sorceress’s garden. Caught by the sorceress, he promises her his unborn daughter who the sorceress collects at the age of seven. Persinette is raised by the sorceress until she is twelve and then locked away in her tower (though the sorceress treats her gently and brings the child everything she could possibly want.) In time she becomes a woman; the prince hears her singing and chants the rhyme so he can climb up the ladder of hair to her room, where he seduces her (“he became bolder and proposed to marry her right then and there, and she consented without hardly knowing what she was doing. Even so, she was able to complete the ceremony” is how Charlotte-Rose rather coyly describes his seduction.)

Persinette becomes pregnant as a result, and in her naivety betrays herself to the sorceress when she complains about her dress growing tighter. The Grimm brothers later changed this to Rapunzel complaining about how much heavier the witch is than her prince, which at a single stroke makes Rapunzel seem extremely stupid.

Then Charlotte-Rose changes the ending so that the prince is blinded, Persinette bears twins in the wilderness, and then heals her lover’s eyes with her redemptive tears. The sorceress continues to torment them, until the young couple’s courage and tender love for each other move her to mercy and she magically returns them to the prince’s loving family.

This story was then retold in Germany by the German author Friedrich Schulz, which is almost identical to Charlotte-Rose’s story except that he changed the girl’s name to Rapunzel, perhaps because it is prettier than parsley. A rapunzel plant is a type of wild rampion. It was then retold by the Grimm Brothers in their 1812 fairytale collection, becoming less powerful, dark and sexy with each edition until we have the tale that most children know today (soon to be retold once again, and released as a Disney cartoon.)

It is Charlotte-Rose and her version which provide the inspiration for my book. She was a fascinating woman – strong-willed, intelligent and fiercely independent – who once rescued her lover from imprisonment by going into his parent’s castle with a travelling troupe of performers disguised as a dancing bear! How could I not write a book about her?

Fairytale Reflections (4) Mary Hoffman

Many people imagine that writing fantasy must somehow be easier than writing realistic or historical fiction. After all, you don’t have to do any research, do you? You just make it all up out of your own head, don’t you? Well, um, no. To be convincing, any fantasy world needs roots in reality – and Mary Hoffman’s wonderful books are an excellent example. A great deal of careful research goes into her fantasies, the well known ‘Stravaganza’ series – as well as into her YA historical fiction like the highly acclaimed ‘Troubadour’, set in the Languedoc at the time of the Albigensian Crusade.

The ‘Stravaganza’ series, beginning with ‘City of Masks’, is set partly in our modern world and partly in an alternate universe’s 16th century Italy: ‘Talia’, which can be reached by cross-dimensional travellers – ‘Stravaganti’ – who are in possession of certain talismans. Each book is set in a different Talian city, based closely on real Italian cities well known to the author. I love the blend of the modern and the exotic in these stories, which besides being magical fantasies also deal with strong emotional themes of illness and death, bullying and persecution.

I think my favourite of the Stravaganza books may be – by a squeak – ‘City of Stars’ in which the heroine Georgia, whose life is made all-too-believably unhappy by her bullying stepbrother, finds the talisman of a little winged horse which takes her to the Talian city of Remora where a dramatic horserace is run. (Anyone who has been to the real Italian city of Siena and experienced the crazy bareback horserace called the Palio will appreciate Mary’s skilfully woven mesh of reality and fantasy.) Here Georgia meets young Cesare – whose beautiful mare Starlight has just given birth to a foal:

The filly was not just dark with the waters of birth, but black, black as the night outside, where the bells of the city’s churches were striking midnight…


The stable door, left ajar by Paolo, moved in a sudden gust of wind. A shaft of moonlight fell across the stall. Cesare gasped.


The little long-legged filly, pulling at her mother’s teat, was rapidly drying in the warm night air. Her coat was a glossy black and she was clearly going to be a first-rate race-horse. But that was not all. As she tried her new muscles, gaining confidence in her spindly legs, she flexed her shoulders and spread out two small damp black wings about the size of a young swan’s.

Mary is an artist to her fingertips – and the most generous of colleagues and friends. Perhaps her choice of fairytale is a case of the attraction of opposites? At any rate, at the bottom of this post you’ll find a brief biography written by herself with characteristic grace and wit. You’ll see why it’s there (and not here) when you’ve read when she has to say about her Fairytale Reflection choice –

THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE

I’m a great believer in the idea that everyone has their own personal myth or, if you like, fairy tale. It doesn’t mean it’s your favourite or that you particularly admire it. It’s more the case that it speaks to you, possibly uncomfortably, about an aspect of your own character or personality, so that you think perhaps the originator of the tale knows you, or someone very like you.

For me this story is The Fisherman and his Wife. I have re-told it myself, in The Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Stories, which I was invited to write for the new millennium. (This was a huge treat in itself, let alone getting a chance to re-tell my “signature tale”). I went back to the original in the Brothers Grimm but then, as with all the stories, allowed myself to expand and embroider it a bit.

This is the basic story:

A childless couple – a fisherman and his wife – were so poor they lived in a pigsty. Every day the man would try with his rod and line to catch a fish in the sea; if he succeeded, they had a fish supper, if not, they went to bed hungry.

One day he caught a flounder who begged to be thrown back, because he was a prince under an enchantment. In my version, the fisherman says, “I wouldn’t eat anything that talked anyway.” He goes home fishless but tells his wife about the adventure. She upbraids him for asking nothing in return for sparing the enchanted prince’s life. “Oh of course we have everything we could wish for, living in a pigsty!” she rants and sends him down to the seashore to ask for a cottage.

The magic flounder grants her wish and the fisherman’s wife is contented for a while but soon wants a castle and gets that too. There is a progression from real estate to personal glory for the wife, who becomes in turn King, Emperor and Pope. Every time the fisherman has to ask the flounder for something grander, he feels more wretched and the sea becomes stormier and of a more livid hue.

Finally, the wife demands control over the rising and setting of the sun and moon – to be, in fact, God.

‘There was a huge clap of thunder and then the storm stilled and the sea was like clear glass.

“Go back,” said the flounder, “and you will find her in the pigsty, as before.”

And there in the pigsty the fisherman and his wife are living to this day.’

So, ambition, greed and an inability to know when to stop on the part of the wife and a certain supine biddability on the part of the husband. How could this be my personal motif story?

It’s about living in the moment, appreciating what you’ve got and not wishing your life away. All of us who write are hungry for a certain amount of fame and fortune. We want people to buy and read our books in large numbers; we’d be happy to be offered film deals; if people recognised our names and said “I LOVE your books – I have all of them!”, we could cope.

It’s not really about material goods and power (although I, for one, would not turn down a villa in Tuscany); it’s more about validation, I think. We pour our creativity and imagination into creating new worlds for readers to inhabit. If we are lucky, a publisher likes what we do well enough to launch it on the world in the form of a printed book.

And what happens after that is subject to vagaries of the market and of Marketing, the trends making up the zeitgeist, the whims of fortune and the lucky spin of the wheel. So we tend to crave more and more. Yes we have a lovely review in the Times or the Guardian but what are the sales figures like? We get short-listed for a prize but don’t win it. We have a publishing advance we feel happy about until we hear someone else has one twice the size.

Worse still, a fellow-author, whose work we think secretly (or not so secretly) is inferior to our own, gets loaded with plaudits and has their books turned into hugely successful Hollywood films. We smile warmly like an Oscar nominated also-ran but really inside we are like the fisherman’s wife: we want more!

And we forget that there are literally thousands – possibly millions – of would-be writers out there who would kill for just one contract, or to be represented by an agent. That, for the long-term published writer is about cottage-level in terms of flounder gifts.

So I try to go back into that little cottage, which I made as cosy and desirable in my version as I could, with an orchard of fruit to turn into jam and a flower garden in front. (I wrote this round about the time we left London and bought our present barn-conversion in Oxfordshire. It’s bigger than a cottage but it does have roses round the door and a plum tree whose annual crop gets converted by a kind of alchemy into something you can spread on a  crumpet).

My lovely illustrator gave the couple’s cottage a thatched roof, which I wouldn’t touch myself, but I bestowed on them green and white crockery, of which I am inordinately fond, and a yard full of ducks and chickens, which I am not allowed.

Yes, a castle might be nice, but would I really want to choose all the curtain-poles and light-fittings for so many bedrooms? The fisherman, who is also me of course, feels very uncomfortable about the castle and all the servants and the four-poster bed.

I have several pacts with different friends about how we would not let success – I mean  wild, ridiculous millionaire-style success – go to our heads and change how we behave to other people, especially other writers. We have seen it happen.

Not perhaps the desire to be Pope but a tendency to pontificate. Not a demand to stop the sun in the sky but perhaps a forgetting that we are poor creatures of dust, whose life on this earth is but a speck viewed in the context of eternity.

So that’s why The Fisherman and his Wife is my signature tale. It is a reminder to stop and enjoy the distance I have travelled from the scholarship girl who scribbled plays and stories in school exercise books, to bask in my cosy cottage stage of life and be excited by glimpses of distant castles but not to let ambition prevent me from living in the moment and taking a proper pride in my achievements without constantly hungering for more.

After all, in my line of work, next year could see one back in the metaphorical pigsty, even if one didn’t want to play God.*

  

*A little secret for non-writers: when you create worlds and people them with characters, you do have a certain Godlike power. Maybe that’s why most of us can stop short of going too far in our ambition. We have all we need in our heads and hearts and count ourselves kings of infinite space, even though we have had dreams – because we have had dreams.

Biography

Mary had her first book published in 1975, which would have provided her with a fish supper had she not already been a vegetarian. She and her husband have never lived in a pigsty, though it was a long time before they could afford carpets in the house they bought to raise their three daughters in.

She has now had over ninety books published, with more in the pipeline, including the successful but not quite castle-providing Stravaganza sequence for Bloomsbury, stand-alone historical novels like The falconer’s Knot and Troubadour. She also writes picturebooks like Amazing Grace and its sequels, which are reputed to have sold over a million and a half copies, which you would have thought might be worth a turret or two.

She has never had a film deal or won a major prize but is not bitter.

Fairytale Reflections (3) Susan Price

What can I say about Susan Price except that she’s one of the greatest contemporary British fantasy writers and I absolutely love her books? If I had to pick a favourite out of the many she's written, I'd be spoilt for choice. I might choose one of the four ‘Ghost World’ series set in ‘a far-distant, Northern Czardom, where half the year is summer and light, and half the year is winter dark’ – 'The Ghost Drum’ won the 1987 Carnegie Medal – or one of the ‘Sterkarm’ books, a blend of futuristic sci-fi time travel into the world of the border reivers of the 16th century.‘The Sterkarm Handshake’ won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize’ in 1998.

As a writer, Susan has nerves of steel. Her work is beautiful but tough, and she’s not particularly interested in happy endings. She has the terse, dry wit of the Icelandic sagas which she loves, and a sharp eye. No one is better than Sue at bringing strange characters and faraway worlds to life. In this passage (from 'Ghost Song') Malyuta, a rough peasant, gazes at his new born son:

He looked at his son’s little body, no longer from head to foot than his own forearm. And the baby’s small mouth and nose, that breathed for him just as well as Malyuta’s great gape and hooter. …His tiny hands and – smaller and smaller – his tiny fingers, each with a tiny, perfect nail. And this smallness would grow to Malyuta’s size!

Now I believe what they say in the churches, thought Malyuta. I believe that water was turned into wine, and that three loaves and five fishes fed ten thousand. If a wonder like this boy of mine can come from two plain folk like my wife and me, then I believe that miracles are true.

It's a wonderful mixture of earthy scepticism and amazed love. And poring over his child like this gives Malyuta the strength he will need in the next few moments when a shaman-witch from the icy north enters the house to take the baby away.

Susan has been interested in myths and folklore since she was nine, and became a professional writer when she was sixteen – and much of her writing is based on, or informed by, folklore. Here she talks about her love of legends and fairy tales, and of one in particular, collected by Joseph Jacobs in his 'Celtic Fairytales'. (Click on the title near the bottom of this post and you can read it.)


SILVERTREE AND GOLDENTREE

As a child, I heard the usual fairy-stories – a 'Cinderella' derived from Perrault, 'Billy Goats Gruff', 'Little Red Riding Hood', and so on.  I loved them.  I loved their repetitions and rhythms– 'Oh, Grandmama, what big ears you have!”, and “Who's trit-trotting across MY bridge? - '  I loved their vivid, beautiful images – the little girl in the scarlet, hooded cloak walking through the dark forest, the glass slipper, the sky-high beanstalk...  But I had no idea of their history, or their cultural resonance.  I imagined that the version of the story that was read to me WAS the story, that there was no other way of telling it.

            At the age of 10, the Greek Myths happened to me, and I was totally smitten.  For a whole year I lived, in my imagination, in the Greek Myths, with flying horses and hydras, with awesome and unpredictable gods, dragons and golden apples.  The next year, when I moved to Secondary School, I discovered the Norse Myths – and they, for me, blew the Greek Myths away.  They felt like coming home: but a home that was no less fascinating, with ice giants, fire giants – in fact, ice and fire all the way through.

            After that, I read every collection of Myths and Legends I could find; and when I ran out of Myths, I  read collections of fairy-stories and folktales: the Grimm Brothers, and Jacob's English Fairy Stories, and Asbjornsen and Moe's Norwegian Stories – and Russian, Irish, Scottish, French, Italian, Polish stories – I couldn't get enough of them.  And, without knowing it, I was learning an enormous amount about story-telling – 'Billy Goats Gruff', for instance, is a master-class in narrative and suspense.

            The more I read, the more something became obvious: – the stories weren't as individual, as distinct from each other – or from Myth – as I'd thought.  The Scots story of Kate Crackernuts was strangely like Cinderella, though set in a more work-a-day world.  Another Scots story, 'The Finger-lock' was Cinderella with a boy as the central character instead of a girl.  No Fairy-Godmother – no pumpkin coach or glass slipper, but the essentials of the story remained.  (There are, I later learned, over three hundred variations on the story usually known as 'Cinderella'.)

            This Norwegian story, 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was the myth of Psyche and Cupid in northern dress.  The English stories, 'Tom-Tit-Tot,' and 'Stormy Weather' were variations of 'Rumpelstiltskin'.  In 'Whuppity-Stoorie' the Rumpelstiltskin figure is female, and kindly – she saves the heroine from a life of drudgery in the end.

            Echoes were everywhere.  In the Irish Legend of Deirdre, the heroine sees a calf killed in winter.  Its red blood falls into the white snow, and a raven comes to eat it.  Deirdre wishes for a husband, “with skin as white as this snow, lips and cheeks as red as this blood, and hair as black as the raven.”  In 'Snow White,' collected hundreds of years later, the queen sits stitching her embroidery in its ebony frame beside a snowy window-ledge.  She pricks her finger, and blood falls on the snow.  She wishes for a child, “with skin as white as this snow, hair as black as this ebony, and lips and cheeks as red as this blood.”

            In the story, 'The Soldier At Heaven's Gate,' a soldier slips into Heaven before his time, and climbs up into God's chair, from where he sees the whole world, and everything that's happening, just as God does.  The soldier is overwhelmed by the world's sorrow, cruelty and pain: and the end of the story is tragic.  I was reminded of how the god Frey, in Norse Myth, climbs into Odin's chair, and sees all of the nine worlds spread before him.  He looks into Jotunheim, sees a beautiful giantess, and falls deeply in love...  The consequences are also tragic, but on a more mythic scale, since this leads, in part, to the defeat of the gods at End of the World.

            The 'Three Heads In The Well'  is another fairy-tale with mythic echoes.  The well is under a great tree, and from the well's depths float up three wise heads, which speak to the heroine.  In Norse Myth, there is a well between the roots of the great World Tree, and by the side of the well is the head of Mirmir, which has wise words for those who question it.  And Celtic Myth is full of magical, talking severed heads.

            Nor are these connections limited to folk-lore and myth.  The Danish legend of Amleth is Shakespeare's Hamlet; and King Lear is, in part, a Cinderella story.

            I was puzzled by all these echoes and correspondences, in stories which were supposed to be widely separated geographically, and dated from a time before broadcasting and widespread literacy could send a story round the world in days, if not hours.  That led me to reading books about folk-lore, rather than books of folk-lore.  I learned that, of course, I wasn't the first to notice that fairy-stories seem to be made up of interchangeable, interlocking pieces, which can be taken apart and put back together in different patterns.  The pieces have been given the name of 'motifs', and have been catalogued – 'The Forbidden Door', 'The Helpful Animal', 'The Cruel Stepmother', and so on.  I was also fascinated to discover that the psychoanalyst, Jung, considered some of these motifs to be archetypes: an integral part of our psychology.  The trackless forest, the wolves and 'the white bear of England's wood'; the depths of the well, the sorcerer – these appear in our dreams and shape our thinking.  The ogres and dragons and man-eating witches of fairy-tales have a reality: small children know there is a monster lurking in the dark, waiting to eat them.  Outside the cave, there was.  One of the 'uses of fairy-tales' is in helping children to sleep.  Telling them, 'Monsters don't exist,' won't help – they know it isn't true.  Giving them a dragon-slayer is far more effective.  These days, 'Dr Who' works a treat.

            However that may be, I have found fairy-stories endlessly compelling throughout my life. Indeed, I think I find them more compelling, now I'm in my fifties, than I did when I was five. Then they were a good yarn.  Now I find that, like the dark well at the foot of the World Tree, they hold fathoms deep of a not always kindly wisdom.

            I can't pinpoint exactly when I started to notice these strangely haunting echoes and connections between tales, but I know that one of the stories I read around that time was the Irish SILVERTREE AND GOLDENTREE, and so that's the story I nominate for this series.  I leave it to the reader to guess which better known fairy-story it echoes, but I will mention this: in Irish myth, a salmon lives in a pool in the Boyne, and eats the hazelnuts which fall into the water.  Hazels were magical trees, and the magical nuts made the salmon wise.  The young Fionn Mac Cumhaill was ordered by his master to catch the salmon, cook it and serve it to him.  As Fionn cooked it, he burned his thumb, stuck it in his mouth, and so tasted the salmon's flesh first, and gained all its wisdom, including the ability to understand birds and animals – just as Siegfried, in Norse legend, cooked the dragon's heart for his master, burned his thumb, stuck it in his mouth, and understood what the birds in the tree overhead were saying...

Fairytale Reflections (2) Adèle Geras

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I’m thrilled to welcome Adèle Geras as the first of my guests on ‘Fairytale Reflections’.  Adèle was born in Jerusalem in 1944 and has published more than 90 books for readers of all ages. Her Egerton Hall trilogy, collected as ‘Happy Ever After’ (Definitions) retells the fairytales of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White setting them in an English boarding school in 1962. She has also published a collection of retellings, brilliantly illustrated by Louise Brierley, called ‘Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories’, but that, alas, is out of print.  

Adèle has loved fairytales all her life, especially the Hans Andersen stories and the Coloured Fairy books by Andrew Lang.  Her most recent books ‘Troy’, ‘Ithaka’ and ‘Dido’ (David Fickling Books) revisit the Odyssey and the Aeneid, but from the viewpoints of some of the common folk caught up and affected by these great dramas: servants in the palaces of Troy and Ithaka and Carthage.  For them, too, the gods are real, and often heartless, and may appear at any moment.  In this excerpt, Halie, King Priam’s elderly cook, notices a strange looking man among the crowds welcoming the Wooden Horse to Troy:

I’ve seen him somewhere before, she thought. He was making his way through the crowd to the beach, and it was his beard she recognized: a silvery-blue colour, as though glinting fish scales had been caught up in his hair. It fell almost to his waist. He seemed to be wet.  His hair was streaming over his shoulders, and a powerful smell of fish came to Halie’s nose as he passed her. Some fisherman she’d seen once, but where?  She turned to ask Theano whether she’d noticed him, but in the turning of her head, all memory of the man left her.

Ominous, understated, doomladen: Adèle can take an old story, tweak it, shake it inside out like a worn shirt, and – voilà – create a brand new garment.  I love her books and perhaps especially her trilogy ‘Happy Ever After’ – a wonderfully fresh and unusual version of three classic fairytales, placed in a mid-twentieth century setting and seamlessly merging fantasy with realism.  And so without more ado, here she is talking about:

HANSEL AND GRETEL

It’s about hunger. It’s about not being able to cope. It’s about mother love of a warped kind. It deals with contrasts. I love it almost more than any other fairy tale and I’ve never had to articulate why before now and hope I can come up with some good reasons alongside my gut reactions.

I’m an only child. When I was a girl, I wanted siblings more than anything else. I put brothers and sisters into my fiction whenever I can because their interaction fascinates me. In one book, The Girls in the Velvet Frame, I used a photograph of my mother and four of her sisters (she had five and four brothers as well!) as the springboard for the story. So that’s the first thing that makes me like the tale: whatever might happen to them, Hansel and Gretel are TOGETHER. They help one another. They share everything. It’s not clear who’s the elder. In the Humperdinck opera, it seems Gretel is the one who teaches but it’s traditionally Hansel who suggests leaving the trail of breadcrumbs and so forth.

The premise, of parents wanting to rid themselves of their children, is horrendous. But in the context of the Hundred Years’ War and starvation and deprivation in much of Europe, there must have been thousands of desperate families with too many mouths to feed. Infanticide becomes more common when things are tough but these parents don’t commit murder with their own hands. Rather, they try and lose their children in the forest and hope for the worst.

So that’s where we start: with every child’s worst fear. They dread, we all dread, abandonment and the disappearance of the familiar. Whenever we hear about lost children, whenever we think of someone forcibly separated from their parents, our hearts shrink in horror. It’s a fear we can easily imagine.

So: two children lost in the dark wood. Alone, but for the help of a magical white bird. Birds are everywhere: they eat the crumbs and wreck any chance of finding the way home, and it’s a bird who leads them to the magical house of the Witch.

This, the Gingerbread Cottage, the Sugar House, the House made all of sweets and goodies...is the standout image of the story and it’s immensely powerful. We know it’s a snare and a delusion and Hansel and Gretel do not. In a pantomime way we’re thinking, calling out: Don’t fall for it! It’s a trick. Leave it alone! But they do fall for it. We know that they ought to resist its blandishments but they’re hungry. They haven’t eaten for days. Icing sugar. Toffee. Marzipan. Sticks of barley sugar holding up the lintel. Chocolate windowsills...it’s completely blissful. Then, from a door which I always imagine made of slabs of iced fruit cake (why? Ask Sigmund Freud!) the Witch emerges.

She’s not often portrayed as a traditional black hat and broomstick regulation witch. In the opera, she’s sometimes a grotesquely blown-up and exaggerated cake shop lady: too bosomy, too rouged, too feminine altogether. And she loves, loves, loves children. She loves to eat them. It reminds me of the Maurice Sendak phrase from Where the Wild Things Are: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so.” Sendak has said that this was uttered by his aunts and uncles when they pinched his chubby childish cheek in an excessively affectionate way and I can vouch for that kind of language from my own experience. My aunts and uncles, (see above) did just that: they’d pinch my cheek gently and exclaim in Yiddish: A zissaleh! Which means: A sweet little thing!

There we have it. The children’s real father and their stepmother don’t love Hansel and Gretel quite enough to keep the family together. The bad mother, the Witch, loves them so much she wants to consume them. To this end, she locks Hansel up and we have cages, and bones, and fattening him up like a calf. And for an extra nasty twist, we have the Witch turning Gretel into her servant while she’s preparing to feast on Hansel.

The end of the story is gruesome. Gretel tricks the Witch, who is reduced to ashes in her own oven. It’s not exactly bland fare for children. Hansel and Gretel escape and with the help of the White Bird, find their way home. They are carrying the Witch’s treasure with them, which doubtless guarantees them a better welcome than the one they might have expected.

Forests, birds, a witch, a marvellous house made of everything delicious, white pebbles gleaming in the moonlight, a cage, a chicken’s thigh bone, a treasure chest filled with jewels....all these are powerful ingredients but what makes Hansel and Gretel greater than the sum of its parts it the love that sees the brother and sister through the terrible ordeals they have to endure. That abides and it’s stronger than any enchantment you can throw at it.

PS I’m adding a poem here which I wrote years ago. It’s the Witch speaking.....



INVITATION

This time, be careful.
They have removed all the stones
That you used last time.

I have ironed sheets
and put green pears to blacken
on the bottom shelf

of the oven. Come
alone or with another.
That doesn't matter.

My mouth is open,
all my loose teeth are sharpened
and the cake is baked.

Let's pipe the icing
into red blobs like bloodstains
and call them flowers.

Pull the shutters closed.
We'll lick and suck the white hours
until you ripen.

Follow the thin bird.
Stay in those flapping shadows
and you will be bones.

Fairytale Reflections (1)

Fairytales are important to me.   They always have been, and I’m not sure why, but in a way that feels connected with the way I love bright colours, sunny spring days, autumn mornings, dark winter nights, snow, ice, my children.  They feel, in other words, very close to home.

And so I had the idea this summer to approach a number of well-known writers of fantasy whose books I greatly admire (and many of whom I am lucky enough to be able to count as friends), and ask each of them to write a guest post about fairytales for this blog.  I’ve asked them to choose a fairytale (or tales) with some particular personal meaning or resonance for them, and simply talk about it in any way they like.

I’m calling the series, which will be appearing every Friday for as long as I can persuade my friends to contribute, ‘Fairytale Reflections’, and I think it’s going to be fascinating and wonderful to see what each writer has to say.  And so, as an introduction to the series, here are my own thoughts on:

The Juniper Tree

A few years ago I used to do quite a lot of storytelling, and one thing I learned early on is that you can only a tell a story well if you really love it.  This is a story I’ve told aloud on many occasions.  It’s from the Brothers Grimm. The illustration below is by Kay Nielsen.

Long, long ago – over an thousand years ago – a woman longed for a child.  Out in the courtyard of her house grew a beautiful juniper tree, and one winter day as she stood beneath it peeling an apple, she cut her finger and blood fell on the snow.  “If only I had a child as red as blood and as white as snow,” the woman sighed.  And the branches of the juniper tree stirred as if a wind was passing through…

Over the course of nine months, as the spring comes and the summer, and the juniper tree fruits, so the woman becomes joyfully pregnant.  She eats the berries, and foresees her death: “If I die, bury me under the juniper tree.”  She gives birth to a son, and dies, and her husband buries her under the tree and grieves… but not for long.  He marries again, and his second wife bears a daughter, little Marlinchen, and is jealous of the son who will inherit the house.

So the stepmother murders the little boy, and then contrives to make Marlinchen feel responsible.  She cooks the child and serves him to his father in a stew, swearing Marlinchen to secrecy.  The father is troubled, he knows not why, but Marlinchen gathers up her brother’s bones in a handkerchief and buries them under the juniper tree.  A mist rises from the juniper tree, the branches stir, and out flies a beautiful fiery bird – her brother’s spirit.  At once her sorrow vanishes and she dances into the house. 

The bird flies away into the village, where it sings a wonderful song which tempts everyone out to listen. 

My mother killed her little son,

My father grieved that I had gone.

My gentle sister pitied me

And buried me under the juniper tree.

Keewit, keewit, what a happy bird I am!

What happens next, you must read the story to find out (there's a version if you click on the title above), but it’s entirely appropriate. The burning, blazing spirit bird with its paradoxically joyful song brings delight to the innocent, but terror and death to the guilty. 

Telling this story aloud, I made up a lilting little tune to fit the words of the song – it seemed impossible to baldly say them.  And I remember telling it aloud in a school hall in upstate New York to about an hundred and fifty ten-year olds.  When I reached the part about the murder, where the mother manages to unload the guilt onto her own daughter, I saw the face of a young girl sitting on the front row.  Her lips had parted and her eyes were dark with horror.  I did feel compunction, but the only way out of the horror is to go on through it, telling the story to the very end.  And the end is happy, one that does not negate the horror but transcends it.  When I’d finished, you could feel all the children relaxing.  They’d trusted me to lead them through a very dark place, but we’d come out into the light.  

Was it right to tell this story to children?  I have done, several times, and no one yet has told me it was a mistake.  On this occasion some of the children came up at the end and said, ‘thanks for the awesome story’, ‘cool story!’   But one of the teachers caught me and said, “Thankyou, these children don’t often hear stories like that.”

What is the meaning of The Juniper Tree?  It’s a very strong story, full of joy and pain.  It seems to say that you can’t have the joy without the pain, but that pain will always be mitigated by joy.  It’s about the power of beauty and music.  It acknowledges dreadful evil, but is still full of hope. Like a poem, it means different things at different times, but you can’t reduce it to this or that message.  It’s itself.  It’s ‘The Juniper Tree.’ It haunts me.

Steel Thistles

I was stunned and very pleasantly surprised this morning to discover this blog coming fourth on a list of  'The UK's Top 10 Children's Literature Blogs', which can be seen here.  Steel Thistles will come up for its first anniversary in November: around this time last year I was still angsting about whether to start a blog at all, and whether I really had enough to say in it.  In fact, I've found great pleasure this year in rambling on about all the things I love in children's literature, folklore and fantasy.  And I've made many new friends!

And so this seems a good moment to say 'thankyou' to all of you who read this blog and take the time to exchange opinions with me. I value and appreciate your time, your expertise, your thoughtful comments. Without you, I would be talking to myself.  Thanks for stopping by!

Realism and Fairytales

When I was ten or so, my brother and I would sometimes bemoan our bad luck in never having any adventures. We were both big fans of Enid Blyton, in whose books groups of children from nice safe middleclass backgrounds not too dissimilar from our own, ran into amazing adventures every single holiday. Every single Christmas or Eastertime, the circus would arrive and the bad-tempered clown would turn out to be an international jewel thief; or the tutor hired as a Latin coach would be a spy. Those lights flashing out to sea beyond the ruined castle were signalling to enemy submarines. The strange noises in the empty house came from smugglers’ barges gliding along the underground river gurgling beneath the trapdoor in the cellar.

Though these adventures were, in one sense, clear fantasy, they were presented with a veneer of realism which could deceive our inexperience. I loved to read of dragons and flying horses, but never expected to meet one. The dilapidated old barn, however, a mile up in the fields near the edge of the woods, with the shotgun cartridges scattered around the doorway – surely that was something which we ought to investigate? So we did, and got shouted at and chased by the farmer for walking over his crops.

Well, we should have known better. Enid Blyton is hardly a realistic writer. Maybe not. But what about some more recent ‘realistic’ books for children – say, Jacqueline Wilson’s nitty-gritty tussles with all sorts of issues? Her heroines live in children’s homes, or have totally unreliable parents, or big stepbrothers who bully them, or are young carers themselves, or try shoplifting and smoking to impress the glamorous ‘bad’ best friend… Isn’t this realism?

Um, not quite. I have the utmost admiration for Jacqueline Wilson’s books, which my own daughters loved – but actually, they are fairytales. Wilson’s stories chime so with young girls, because everyone loves a good dose of misery followed by a happy ending. (Look at Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘A Little Princess.’) Aged about ten, my younger daughter and her friends were writing stories at school that were essentially Jacqueline Wilson fan-lit: first-person accounts of an imaginary home life in which Dad got drunk, blacked their eyes and wept, while feckless Mum went out with the empties and came back in with another tattoo. Of course there are such homes, far too many of them. But the reason I claim Wilson’s books are really fairytales, is because her young heroines who go through so much, always end up wiser, happier, and in a better place than they started from. They are fairytale endings. I say this with no shadow of disparagement – but realistic, they’re not.

Alison Lurie, in her brilliant set of essays on children’s literature ‘Don’t Tell the Grownups’ (Bloomsbury 1990), recounts how at the age of five she was given ‘The Here and Now Story Book’ by a writer named Lucy Sprague Mitchell – whose credo was that fairytales delayed ‘a child’s rationalising of the world’ and left him ‘longer than is desirable without the beginnings of scientific standards’. Lurie writes:

Inside, I could read about The Grocery Man (“This is John’s Mother. Good morning, Mr Grocery Man”) … The children and parents in these stories were exactly like the ones I knew, only more boring. They never did anything really wrong, and nothing dangerous or surprising ever happened to them – no more than it did to Dick and Jane, whom I and my friends were soon to meet in first grade.

Learning to read in the early sixties, I also encountered such children: the ‘Janet and John’ readers, and the safe, sunny, pedestrian world of the Ladybird books – where all families were made up of a Mummy who stayed at home and baked, a Daddy who went to work carrying a briefcase, a little boy in shorts, a little girl in a frilly dress, and a spaniel. Plots would revolve around picnics, kite-flying, the collection of tadpoles in jam-jars, and the making and icing of fairycakes.

Lurie continues with devastating truth:

After we grew up, of course, we found out how unrealistic these stories had been. The simple, pleasant adult society they had prepared us for did not exist. As we suspected, the fairy tales had been right all along – the world was full of hostile, stupid giants and perilous castles and people who abandoned their children in the nearest forest.

To succeed in this world you needed some special skill or patronage, plus remarkable luck, and it didn’t hurt to be very good-looking. The other qualities that counted were wit, boldness, stubborn persistence, and an eye for the main chance. Kindness to those in trouble was also advisable – you never knew who might be useful to you later on.

And this still seems to me the best argument against those who still think that fairytales are unreal; or at least more unreal than books set in the everyday here and now. How much do we need to be taught, in Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s phrase, to ‘rationalise the world’? Do we really need protection from the obviously fantastic? My brother and I, as children, could imagine ourselves into an Enid Blyton-style adventure – and, so doing, explored potentially dangerous deserted barns and houses – because her books contained no obvious impossibilities. But fiction is fiction is fiction.

Stories are real and not-real at the same time. What we really need in life, it seems to me, is encouragement. Plenty of fiction will take you from A – Z on the direct route, but you may possibly learn more on the scenic way. We need to allow ourselves and our children to discover the power of metaphor to transform experience. I would put my money on the basic stuff of fairytales being far more likely to happen to the average child than the chance of capturing an enemy spy or discovering a nest of coiners. Your parents may abandon you, or die, or abuse you; you may be ignored and disregarded; later in life your lover may forget you; you may have to work hard for little or no reward.

Though at first glance fairytales may seem simple or childish with their pre-industrial characters and settings, they offer a rich harvest of archetypes, of metaphors for life, of delight in the beautiful world and of resignation in the face of death. Fairytales we have read as children often stay with us forever. Some are frightening, of course… for the land of faerie is a dangerous place… but so is this world, and we do children no favours by pretending otherwise. Fairytales – real fairytales – don’t pull punches. They tell us life often looks overwhelming - impossible. You may have to travel to the back of the north wind, ride over seven miles of steel thistles, weave shirts out of nettles, suffer insults in silence, scale a glass mountain – but ‘pack courage, leave fear at home’, and you will find a way.