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.

 

Faerie cities

This wonderful little city stands as if sprung from the soil, in a neighbour's garden. It reminds me of the medieval French city of Carcassonne, whose name was used by Lord Dunsany for a faerie city in one of his tales; though rather oddly he seems to have picked the name from a reference in a friend's letter and never to have known it is the name of a real place.:

Some had heard of it in speech or song; some had read of it and some had dreamed of it. ...Far away it was, and far and far away, a city of gleaming ramparts rising one over the other, and marble terraces behind the ramparts, and fountains shimmering on the terraces. To Carcassonne the elf-kings with their fairies had first retreated from men, and had built it on an evening late in May by blowing their elfin horns. Carcassonne!  Carcassonne!

This little fairy city - for me - irresistably conjures a beautiful poem of Kipling's, from 'Puck of Pook's Hill'.

 

CITIES and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season's Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
"See how our works endure!"

In The Library of Imaginary Books

Deep in the enclaves of Unseen University (in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, in case anyone reading this doesn’t already know) is the University Library, where the presence of so many books has warped space into a mysterious form called L-space (or Library-space) expressed by the equation:

Books are entrances into other worlds: in UU Library this is not a metaphor. And, a consequence of the properties of L-space, the shelves contain every book ever written, unwritten or yet to be written. Terry Pratchett's UU Library is thus - probably - different from Jorge Luis Borges' Biblioteca de Babel, in which the books additionally contain every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet - and are therefore mostly gibberish.

Librarian of the Discworld as he appears in The Discworld Companion, illustrated by Paul Kidby

The Babel library would be a bad place to work. I would like, therefore (if I have the Librarian’s permission), to take you on a small tour of UU library, concentrating on a section I often like to visit: the section for Imaginary Books.  These, of course, are books which exist only between the covers of other books and are therefore fictional to the power two: fiction². I’ve delighted in many such titles over the years, so let’s tiptoe past the chained, uneasily-slumbering grimoires of UU Library’s extensive magical sections, and I’ll show you my favourites.

The first is ‘The Orange and the Apple’, which exists between the covers of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘A Fall of Moondust’, the story of a ‘moon-bus’ full of passengers which plunges into the deep soft dust of the Sea of Tranquillity following a moon-quake. During the desperate rescue operation which ensues, the trapped passengers organise an entertainment to keep their minds off claustrophobia and the fear of death. It may not be one of Clarke’s best-known novels, but it contains some good character sketches and is often very funny. The passengers take turns reading aloud the only two novels on board, Jack Schaefer’s classic western ‘Shane’ and a ‘new historical romance’ ‘The Orange and the Apple’, featuring an affair between Sir Isaac Newton and Nell Gwynne. Let me reach it down from the shelf for you: a cheap paperback with a lurid cover and a cracked spine:

The author certainly wasted no time. Within three pages, Sir Isaac Newton was explaining the law of gravitation to Mistress Gwynne, who had already hinted that she would like to do something in return.


…“Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks, there is much that a woman might teach you.”
“And what is that, my pretty maid?”
Mistress Nell blushed shyly.
“I fear,” she sighed, “that you have given your life to the things of the mind. You have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much strange wisdom.”
“Call me ‘Ike’,” said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings of her blouse.

Close beside this on the shelves is an array of titles from Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. There’s the Guide itself, of course, clearly an e-book on an e-reader:

…a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.

That was written in the late 1970’s, so you can see the power of L-space right there.  Next to the Guide is an entire bookcase sagging beneath the weight of the many volumes of the Encyclopaedia Galactica. Oh, and here are a couple of paperbacks which look to have been much thumbed by the wizards of Unseen University - so long as they’re sure no other wizard is watching: Eccentrica Gallumbits’ ‘The Big Bang Theory, A Personal View’, and ‘Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex But Have Been Forced To Find Out’. Next on the shelf - in a far more pristine condition - is Oolon Colluphid’s galaxy-rattling series of popular theological texts: ‘Where God Went Wrong’, ‘Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes’, ‘Who Is This God Person Anyway?’ and ‘Well That About Wraps It Up For God’.

If you’re not interested in science, or philosophy, we can move on to the literary biographies.  Here's one I’ve always wanted to read: ‘Pard-Spirit: A Study of Branwell Brontë’ by one Mr Mybug - nestling within the pages of Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’. It’s a handsome looking hardback. I suspect he had to pay for its publication, but he made sure there was a large and arty black and white photograph of himself on the back of the dust jacket.

‘It’s goin’ to be dam good,’ said Mr Mybug. ‘It’s a psychological study, of course, and I’ve got a lot of new matter, including three letters he wrote to an old aunt in Ireland, Mrs Prunty, during the period when he was working on Wuthering Heights.’ He glanced sharply at Flora to see if she would react.


‘It’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff… Secretly, he worked twelve hours a day writing Shirley and Villette - and of course, Wuthering Heights. I’ve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty.  His letters to her are little masterpieces of repressed passion. They’re full of tender little questions… he asks her how is her rheumatism… has her cat, Toby, “recovered from the fever”… … how is Cousin Martha (and what a picture we get of Cousin Martha in those simple words, a raw Irish chit, high-cheekboned, with limp black hair and clear blood in her lips!) …’

Delicious!

Oh look - here, bound in leather and lying on a slanting wooden stand, is the Magician's Book from the 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader'! I flick back the two lead clasps which hold it shut, and lift open the cover to reveal beautiful illuminated vellum pages filled with spells -

cures for warts (by washing your hands by moonlight in a silver basin) and toothache and cramp, and a spell for taking a swarm of bees...

... how to find buried treasure, how to remember things forgotten, how to forget things you wanted to forget, how to tell whether anyone was speaking the truth...

Dangerous stuff, all of it.  I can see you're taking a little bit too much interest, so I close the cover and fasten the clasps (the book tingles and buzzes under my fingers as I do so) and we move on.


Ah! Here, sticking quite a long way out from the shelf and leaning slantwise to fit, is a tall folio manuscript bound in a red leather cover. The catalogue label coming unstuck from the spine reads: 'Travel: Imaginary'.  I pull it tenderly out.  Odd though it may seem, this could be the most valuable book in the entire section.  It's written 'in a wandering hand' in spiky black ink with lots of curlicues. The title page has many titles on it, crossed out one after another: so:

My Diary.  My Unexpected Journey. There and Back Again.  And What Happened After.  Adventures of Five Hobbits. The Tale of the Great Ring, compiled by Bilbo Baggins from his own observations and those of his friends. What We Did in the War of the Ring.

Here Bilbo's hand ends, and Frodo has written:
THE DOWNFALL OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING'.

Bilbo and Frodo's own autobiographical account!  I know you'd love to stand here and leaf through it, but today I'm just showing you what's on the shelves, and we haven't time.  You can come back by yourself another day.

How do you fancy Victorian poetry? Courtesy of A S Byatt’s ‘Possession’, allow me to pull out this stout green book, the ‘Collected Poems of Randolph Henry Ash’ including of course ‘The Garden of Proserpina’ and ‘Ask to Embla’ -

No?  Then how about my own preference, this slim volume in limp violet suede, with faded spine and curling corners, whose embossed gold title reads simply ‘The Fairy Melusine’ by Christabel LaMotte, a writer who owes a clear debt to Emily Dickinson. As we pluck it from the shelf, out flutters a loose manuscript sheet with a poem on it:


It came all so still
The little Thing -
And would not stay -
Our Questioning -
A heavy Breath -
One two and three -
And then the lapsed Eternity -
A Lapis Flesh
The Crimson - Gone -
It came as still
As any Stone -



Is there anything you'd like to see that I haven't shown you?  It'll be here.  Just let me know...

The Girl Who Followed the North Star

 

It is a northern land, a hard place where the trees bend always to a cold, flowing wind. At night the north star flashes and beckons, a jewelled finger.  The skies turn like a dial, so big and remote…

            A child lived there who thought how huge everything was, and was afraid of the emptiness between stars and beyond stars.  But her grandmother whispered, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.  Don’t you know the whole universe is knotted up in a handkerchief in God’s pocket?”

            So the child grew up fearless. Often she spent her nights wandering on the high moors with a stick of yew in her hand, calling the owls, who would whirr down in a soft blur of feathers and clutch her arm, turning their black brilliant eyes here and there. But as sunrise streaked the sky she would be back at the cottage to blow the fire aflame and put the kettle on the hob and kiss her grandmother awake.

            Then her grandmother died and was buried.  After the funeral, the young girl sat alone in the cold cottage and cried.  “Grandmother, where have you gone? Why have you left me? How can I find you?” And each night she wandered further and further afield, following the bright beckoning of the North Star, axle of the sky, till she came to the country where it is always dark and day is no more than winter twilight, even at noon.  Underfoot was heather, and black bilberries, and withered bracken.  One night she came over a ridge and saw a lake lying beneath her. 

Its waters were still and dark and very cold, and it lapped a shore of granite pebbles that glinted in the starlight.  And, straining her eyes, she thought she saw the dim loom of an island far out in the lake, and at once she was overcome with longing to set foot on it, but there were no boats on the shore, and the water was too cold to enter.  It would have frozen her heart.  And it seemed the North Star shone directly over the island, tugging her towards it.

            Three times the stars wheeled overhead as she walked along the shore, watching the dark shape of the island sleeping on the water, and in all this time she saw no more than a quick meteor threading the high heaven, and heard no more than the crunch of her own footsteps and the knock of her staff striking the shingle.

            At last she came to a beach where, scattered here and there  in the rough gravel, were round pebbles that glowed like tiny moons; and an old man sat huddled on the shore beside his boat, a patched old leather coracle.  He was staring at the ground, but when he heard the young woman coming he scrambled up, crying, “Go away, go away.  All this is mine!”

            “What do you mean? I only want you to lend me your coracle so that I can cross over to the island.”

            “Island? What island?” asked the old man.  Then he looked cunning, and counted on his fingers, and mumbled to himself, and said, looking up, “You must pay me for the use of my coracle.”

            “I have no money,” she said.  “But I will work for you.”

            The old man set her to pick up all of the glowing pebbles and heap them near the coracle.

            Under the turning sky the girl went back and forth, collecting the stones till her hands were cold and bruised, but although the pile grew higher and higher, the old man was never satisfied.  Soon all the shingle close by was dull, while the pile beside the coracle shone like a white beacon.  She was so stiff she wondered if she would ever be able to straighten up again, but still she had to go to and fro, and each time she asked for the coracle, the old man shook his head.

            Finally she went back and threw the last stones on the high pile. “I have done enough.”

            “Not yet, not yet,” said the old man, groping in the heap.

            “Yes; if you do not give me the boat now, I will take it – I have earned it! – and I will crack your head into the bargain.”

            The old man turned to her then and put two stones into her hand – but at the last moment he snatched one back – saying, “The coracle leaks and will not float.  These are opals.  Take your fee and go.”

            “Row me over,” the girl demanded, throwing the jewel down.  But because the old man moaned and clutched at his dead heap she lowered her stick, saying, “You would do better as an honest fisherman, I think,” and dragged the coracle into the water, which lapped her foot and seeped into her shoe, so cold that she gasped.  She climbed in and poled off with her stick, then took up the paddle and began to make her way towards the darkness that lay on the centre of the water, just showing an island’s shape against the star-prickled sky.

            The leather sides of the coracle were cracked and dry, and the cold water welled in so that she had to stop paddling and bail with cupped hands till they stung and ached with cold.  At last the leather swelled with the moisture and the cracks were closed.  Then she picked up the paddle and went on.

            Slowly the island drew nearer, and larger, until she was working into a little bay where small, gnarled trees grew right against the water and leaned out above it.  She grasped their branches and pulled herself out of the boat, and they shook bitter bark down into her face and hair, and her fingers were sticky with resin.

            Slowly she hobbled inland with bent back and frozen hands, and she blundered in the darkness, for gall and bark were stinging her eyes.  But she dragged herself uphill, tearing her skin on brambles, till she reached a high mound in the centre of the island, free from trees and bushes, covered with short, dry grass.  At the top of the mound she drove her staff into the turf and sat down beneath it and wept in the cold air, and the tears washed the bark from her eyes and splashed warm on her hands, watering the ground with salt.  And when she looked up there was the north star, straight overhead, brighter than she had ever seen it.

And the stick at her back rooted, and put out dark leaves and small white flowers.

Copyright Katherine Langrish  2013

               Illustration by Arthur Rackham: 'The Wilderness Under the Stars' (cabinetparticulier: via seirinko-deactivated20130402)

How To Develop A Story (by Lewis Carroll)

This is something I've always wanted to share with you.   It's a piece called 'Photography Extraordinary' written by Lewis Carroll for one of the home-made family newspapers he wrote and illustrated, The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch. It was published in the Illustrated News of Jan 28 1860, five years before the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - when Carroll was twenty-eight.

It's very funny. I recognise both his satirical claim that writing a novel could, via some technical advance, become a mere 'mechanical labour' - and the comment about the first example being 'utterly unsaleable in the present day'. Plus ça change.  In amongst the fun, however, are several lessons for the aspiring writer.  For example, the same plot elements can be worked very differently.  And if your work is dull, you may need to develop it... 

Getting into the spirit of the the thing, I thought I should use different intensities of colour to highlight his point. Allow me to reproduce, without further ado, Lewis Carroll's

Photography Extraordinary!

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied to the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.  We have kindly been permitted by the artist to be present during one of his experiments.

The operator began by stating that the ideas of the feeblest intellect, when once received on properly prepared paper, could be ‘developed’ up the highest intensity. He … summoned a young man from an adjoining room, who appeared to be of the very weakest possible physical and mental powers. … The machine being in position and a mesmeric rapport established between the mind of the patient and the object glass … [he] at once commenced the operation.

After the paper had been exposed for the requisite time, it was removed and submitted to our inspection; we found it to be covered in faint and almost illegible characters. A closer scrutiny revealed the following:-

“The eve was soft and dewy mild; a zephyr whispered in the lofty glade, and a few light drops of rain cooled the thirsty soil.  At a slow amble, along a primrose-bordered path, rode a gentle-looking and amiable youth, holding a light cane in his delicate hand; the pony moved gracefully beneath him, inhaling as it went the fragrance of the roadside flowers: the calm smile, and languid eyes, so admirably harmonising with the fair features of the rider, showed the even tenor of his thoughts. With a sweet, though feeble voice, he plaintively murmured out the gentle regrets that clouded his breast:

‘Alas! She would not hear my prayer!

Yet it were rash to tear my hair;

Disfigured, I should be less fair.

She was unwise, I may say blind;

Once she was lovingly inclined;

Some circumstance has changed her mind.’

There was a moment’s silence; the pony stumbled over a stone in the path, and unseated his rider.  A crash was heard among the dried leaves; the youth arose; a slight bruise on his left shoulder, and the disarrangement of his cravat, were the only traces that remained of this trifling accident.”

“This,” we remarked as we returned the papers, “belongs apparently to the Milk and Water School of Novels.”  “You are quite right,” our friend replied, “and, in its present state, it is of course utterly unsaleable in the present day: we shall find, however, that the next stage of development will remove it into the strong-minded or Matter-of-Fact School.”  After dipping it into various acids, he again submitted it to us: it had now become the following: -

“The evening was of the ordinary character; barometer at ‘change’: a wind was getting up in the wood, and some rain was beginning to fall; a bad look-out for the farmers.  A gentleman approached along the bridle-road, carrying a stout knobbed stick in his hand, and mounted on a serviceable nag, possibly worth some £40 or so; there was a settled business-like expression on the rider’s face, and he whistled as he rode; he seemed to be hunting for rhymes in his head, and at length repeated, in a satisfied tone, the following composition:-

‘Well! so my offer was no go!

She might do worse, I told her so;

She was a fool to answer ‘No’.

However, things are as they stood;

Now would I have her if I could,

For there are plenty more as good.’

At this moment the horse set his foot in a hole, and rolled over; his rider rose with difficulty; he had sustained several severe bruises, and fractured two ribs; it was some time before he forgot that unlucky day.”

We returned this with the strongest expression of admiration, and requested it might now be developed to the highest possible degree. Our friend readily consented, and shortly presented us with the result, which he informed us belonged to the Spasmodic or German School.  We perused it with indescribable sensations of surprise and delight.

“The night was wildly tempestuous – a hurricane raved through the murky forest – furious torrents of rain lashed the groaning earth.  With a headlong rush – down a precipitous mountain gorge – dashed a mounted horseman armed to the teeth – his horse bounded beneath him at a mad gallop, snorting fire from its distended nostrils as it flew.  The rider’s knotted brows – rolling eyeballs – and clenched teeth – expressed the intense agony of his mind – weird visions loomed upon his burning brain – while with one mad yell he poured forth the torrent of his burning passion:-

‘Firebrands and daggers! hope hath fled!

To atoms dash the double dead!

My brain is fire – my heart is lead!

Her soul is flint – and what am I?

Scorch’d by her fierce relentless eye,

Nothingness is my destiny!’

There was a moment’s pause. Horror! his path ended in a fathomless abyss - *** A rush – a flash – a crash – all was over. Three drops of blood, two teeth and a stirrup were all that remained to tell where the wild horseman met his doom.”

Our friend concluded with various minor experiments, such as working up a passage of Wordsworth into strong, sterling poetry: the same experiment was tried on a passage of Byron, at our request, but the paper came out scorched and blistered by the fiery epithets thus produced.

Picture  credit:

Lewis Carroll, self portrait, circa 1856 Wikimedia Commons