a gallimaufry

Habetrot

‘Habetrot’ is an Anglo-Scottish version of ‘Rumplestiltskin’ (Brothers Grimm) or the East Anglian ‘Tom Tit Tot’; I read it in The Virago Book of Witches, edited by Shahrukh Husain (the original source is A Dictionary of Fairies by Kate Briggs and if anyone would like to republish this so I could afford to buy a copy please do, I would be so happy). Funny and female centred, it is now definitely my favourite version.

In both ‘Rumplestiltskin’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the heroine is brought to the attention of a king through the vain boasting of a parent, and in both these stories the king is hardly ideal husband material since he threatens the girl with death if she fails to spin either straw into gold or five skeins a day for a month each year. The girl’s saviour demands a high price: Rumplestiltskin wants her first-born child; Tom Tit Tot wants her. In each case, the girl can avoid this price if she discovers the creature’s name – which she does, by accident and via someone else.

‘Habetrot’ is very different. The story has a very domestic and even comic feel to it, with a lassie who hates spinning and instead scampers about the countryside, and an exasperated mother who needs her to earn some money so locks her up until she’s spun seven skeins. After a day of failing to produce anything decent, the lassie escapes and discovers Habetrot, who offers to spin the skeins for her. The price? There is no price. Habetrot swears the lassie to secrecy and tells her to call on her if ever she needs help.

(Illustration by Morris Meredith Williams from Elizabeth W. Grierson, The Scottish Fairy Book; London: Fisher Unwin, 1910; found here)

‘Habetrot’ seems to be either in explicit conversation with one of both of the other versions of this tale, or truncated. The lassie discovers Habetrot’s name herself quite easily, but there is no especial reason why she shouldn’t know it as Habetrot is kind and helpful and never seeks to take advantage of her. So this seems an odd detail to include. Perhaps there was once a longer version where it was significant? Or perhaps it is because the tale is built on one of the other versions, and this detail has persisted.

After Habetrot has spun and delivered the skeins, the lassie, feeling peckish, cooks and eats seven black puddings. On discovering this her mother rushes out and shouts:

‘My dawtie ha’ spun se’en, se’en
My dawtie ha’ ate se’en, se’en
An a’ afore daylicht.’

This catches the attention of the young laird. In ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the mother sings ‘My darter ha' ate five, five pies today’, but quickly changes it to ‘My darter ha' spun five, five skeins today’ out of embarrassment when the passing king shows an interest. The clear difference here is that the East Anglian mother lies out of shame over her daughter’s greed, but the Scottish mother is equally proud of her daughter’s spinning and her appetite. The joke presumably is that the appetite is not for eating black pudding but for another activity which might prove attractive to a young man. And as soon as he sees the lassie he asks to marry her.

But it is the ending that particularly pleases me. The laird never threatens his fiancée but he does witter on about all the lovely skeins she’ll spin for him after they’re married, so Habetrot tells her to bring him down to the burnside. She then lets the couple into a chamber where she and her friends are. The laird is horrified at their long lips, and they explain that although they were once bonnie, their lips have grown long from spinning. Habetrot tells him,

‘Yir ain lassie’ll be the same, bonnie an she is noo, for she’s fair mad about the spinning.’
‘She’ll not!’ said the laird. ‘Not another spindle shall she touch from this day on.’

And so everyone gets what they want. The laird marries the pretty lassie, she can roam the countryside with him instead of spinning, ‘and every head of lint that grew on that land went to old Habetrot to be spun’, presumably enriching her.

(Illustration by John D. Batten from Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales; London: David Nutt, 1894; found here)

It is hard to know, without being aware of the story’s origins, whether the differences of ‘Habetrot’ from the German and East Anglian tales are intended to be directly compared with them, or not. It is definitely tempting to see this as a consciously female ‘retelling’ of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Tom Tit Tot’ but I don’t have any evidence for this.

In the other versions, there is a real power imbalance between the king and the girl and he threatens with death; in ‘Habetrot’ the laird seems amiable and with the help of Habetrot the lassie can manage him and achieve the life she wants. In this version, laziness (or dislike of domestic tasks) is rewarded – after all, isn’t the point of marrying a rich man to get out of having to do those tasks you don’t like? – and apart from being locked up for a day the lassie suffers very little.

The lone male imp or little man of the other two stories is replaced in ‘Habetrot’ by a small community of women who are ready to help the lassie rather than exploit her. While we might not be delighted at the reinforcement of the primacy of female beauty as currency in the world, the sly way in which Habetrot uses it against the laird to help the lassie feels like a victory. So too does the idea of a secret group of magical little women hidden on the other side of a self-bored stone who feel no need to aspire to beauty. With female characters driving the story and with humour, ‘Habetrot’ strips out the darkness of the other tales to give our female characters a more unequivocally happy ending.

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

The Tale of the Fisherman and his Wife

(Illustration by Walter Crane from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane. London: Macmillan & Co., 1882; from here)

This is another of the better-known of the Grimms’ tales, and I do remember it quite well from my childhood. You can read it here, although it refers coyly to the fisherfolk’s home as a ‘filthy shack’ whereas Joyce Crick in the Oxford University Press edition translates it more robustly as a ‘piss-pot’. Mmm. No wonder the fisherman’s wife is a pushy opportunist. Who wouldn’t want to escape that?

In her endnotes Crick explains that a painter, Philipp Otto Runge, was the Grimms’ source for this story. His first version was in Pomeranian dialect but this was later replaced by another he had written in Hamburg dialect. He didn’t invent the story, there were quite a few variants in circulation including at least one in which it was the fisherman who was the demanding character rather than his wife. So it’s an interesting hybrid even before the Grimms receive it, a story which has been deliberately shaped by an educated man to retain the flavour of the ‘volk’ and its oral nature, even as it’s been changed into a written piece of literature for the more educated members of society.

(Luise Neupert, silhouette illustration in Märchenhafte Papierschnitte, Kassel : Brüder Grimm-Gesellschaft, 2002; found here)

This version is pleasing, despite the misogyny lurking behind the characterisation of the wife, because it is funny and elegant. The increasingly outrageous and improbable demands of the wife – to be king! emperor! pope! God! – are reflected by the state of the sea, which grows murkier, stormier, each time the fisherman returns with a fresh request. The obvious moral of the story is to beware of over-reaching, of being too greedy and discontented. Discontent feeds upon itself; the wife becomes more and more frenzied in her demands until at the end, when she’s declaring she wants to become God, she completely loses self-control:

Then she flew into a rage; her hair flew wildly round her head, she tore her stays and gave him a kick with her foot and screamed: ‘I won’t stand it and I won’t stand it any longer! Will you be off!’

But I think that responsibility for this lies with the fisherman as well as his wife. In the Grimms’ telling, it is clear that unlike his wife he has a moral sense and he understands that acceding to her demands is wrong. However, he is too weak to seriously oppose her and obeys her against his better judgement. Thus she grows into a monster. Did this have extra resonance when the Grimms were first assembling their collection, in a German kingdom occupied by the French under the emperor Napoleon? Certainly it lends itself to political interpretation: Crick writes that a version was printed in 1814 which turned it into an allegory of the fall of Napoleon.

An amusing element of this story is that the characters seem conscious that they are in a fairy tale. The fisherman’s response to the flounder is exactly the response one would expect of a reader of fairy tales:

Then the flounder spoke to him. ‘Listen to me, fisherman. Spare my life, I beg you. I’m not a real flounder. I am a prince under a spell. What good will it do you if you kill me? You wouldn’t enjoy eating me. Put me back in the water and let me go.’ ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘you don’t need to make such a fuss about it. I’d have let a talking flounder go anyway.’

And his wife knows the rules that we readers know: you help a magical character, you are rewarded:

‘Didn’t you make a wish for anything?’ said his wife. […] ‘Go back and call him. Tell him we want to have a little cottage. He’ll do that for sure. […] For heaven’s sake, […] you did catch him after all, and you did let him go. He’s sure to do it. Go down right now.’

Perhaps this shared consciousness of being characters in a story brings them a little closer to us, who are on the outside looking in.

And what about the enchanted flounder? We never know his story. I hope he either enjoys being a fish, or is freed from the spell…

(Illustration by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; found here)

Hansel and Gretel

(Eleanor Davis, Witch House, 2007, 3-D model in cloth, wood, and acrylic; from here; the artist’s website is here)

You all know the story of Hansel and Gretel, don’t you? But you can read it here, if you like. Because in fact, on rereading it, I found there were elements I hadn’t remembered. That their mother was a stepmother, and that she was the moving force behind the abandoning of the children. That both parents had taken the children into the woods, not just the father. That each time, Hansel had pretended he was looking back to see something on the roof of the house – his little white cat, his dove – to hide his dropping of the trail of white stones or crumbs. That the parents had tied a bough to a tree to make a tapping noise like the tapping of an axe on a trunk and convince the children that they were still nearby when in fact they had crept home and left them alone in the forest. That after Gretel had killed the witch, a white duck carried them safely over ‘a great stretch of water’. That the stepmother had died while the children were in the forest. That the story ends thus:

Then all their cares were at an end and they lived in sheer joy together. My story’s done. See a mouse run. And whoever catches it can make a great big furry hood from it. (Joyce Crick’s translation from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Selected Tales.)

Joyce Crick’s note to the story explains that this ending was added in the fifth edition (1843) of the tales, when Wilhelm Grimm revised ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to reflect a version written by August Stöber (in Elsässisches Volksbüchlein). Crick writes:

In phrase after phrase the story now offers more purchase for moral judgement than the laconic discretion of the version in the first edition did. The stepmother is made harsher, the father more plagued by conscience, Gretel more weepy, Hansel more confident.

The famine which drives the family to the brink of starvation, the explanations and motivations for the characters’ behaviour, the white duck, these were all elaborations on the original story. There is a comparison of the first and fifth editions here, so you can judge the extent of the changes for yourself.

The stepmother was, until the fourth edition (1840), the mother. Marina Warner argued, as far as I recall since I don’t have a copy of From the Beast to the Blonde here, that the Grimms systematically turned the ‘bad mothers’ of their tales into stepmothers: this reflects a social fact – stepmothers often were harsher to their stepchildren and, in a world where food and other resources might be scarce and survival a struggle, often did favour their own children – and an emotional one – mothers must be nurturing and kind, they may not hate or kill their offspring, it’s an idea we simply do not like to entertain, even now.

In the woods lurks another maternal figure: the witch. If the stepmother is the Bad Mother, the witch is the Very Bad Mother Indeed. The delicious gingerbread house, the supper of ‘milk and pancakes with sugar, and apples and nuts’ and the ‘two lovely little beds with white sheets’ appear to be the attributes of a kind and loving parent, but alas, by the next day the old woman has locked Hansel in a cage to fatten him up and forced Gretel to be her skivvy.

The tale very clearly links hunger for physical food with hunger for maternal love. When Hansel and Gretel devour the gingerbread house, they’re not simply being gluttonous but desperately attempting to satisfy their craving for their mother. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in connexion with this story (in The Uses of Enchantment), the gingerbread house is in one sense the mother’s body, which literally feeds the infant. But the inhabitant of the house plans to feed upon the children. In this respect she is like the fairies I am reading about in Diane Purkiss’ Troublesome Things, fairies descended from Sumerian child-eating demons and lamia, who drain babies of life even as they appear to suckle them. In my family, adults – including me – often talk about ‘eating’ children: ‘I could gobble you up!’ But we’re not Sumerian child-eating demons: it’s a way of expressing our love. And this seems not freakishness on our part, but something quite common; well, between mothers and babies at least. And Maurice Sendak described his aunts and uncles as saying they would ‘eat him up’ when they visited him (they inspired the wild things in Where the Wild Things Are). And in your family?

Certain motifs in the story are connected by their colour, white: Hansel’s little cat and dove, who may be sitting on the roof; the shining white pebbles and the moon by whose light Hansel gathers them; the duck who carries the children safely over the water. These are the children’s helpers. But in the deceitful world of the gingerbread house, the milk and the white sheets on the little beds are part of the illusion of aid.

Despite its cheery themes of attempted infanticide and cannibalism, if any of the Grimms’ tales can be said to be for children, it is ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The children triumph through their own resourcefulness, they begin as powerless and abused but end the tale in control of their destinies and bringing home wealth to sustain the family. And they push their ‘mother’ into the oven! What could be more enjoyable for a child than vicariously doing that?

(Albert Weisgerber, illustration from Kinder- und Hausmärchen nach Sammlung der Brüder Grimm, retold by Hans Fraungruber; Wien & Leipzig: Martin Gerlach & Co., ca. 1900, from here; you can see the whole book here)

Illustration in text: Paul Meyerheim, illustration from Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1893; from here)

the three little men in the forest

There was once a series of posts about the Grimms’ fairy tales, which fell asleep for a hundred years. A thicket of thorns grew up around it, and those few who remembered it at all supposed that it had succumbed to the writer’s usual inability to persevere with anything. Then suddenly, one cold winter’s day, the darkest of the year, a new post appeared, like a lovely rose blossoming. Hem.

All was not quite as it had been, however. The writer had belatedly noticed that all the fairy tales had already been posted on the internets, and so she decided that rather than hammer out her turgid retellings she would direct readers to a proper translation of the Grimms’ version, where they could enjoy the stories in their proper forms.

So, ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’ can be read here, if you don’t have a copy or know it already.

(Arthur Rackham, ‘What did she find there but real ripe strawberries’, illustration for Little Brother and Little Sister and Other Tales by the Brothers Grimm, London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1917; found here)

It’s a cheerful welding together of two sorts of story, but one that I have found curious. The first is called ‘the kind and unkind girls’ trope, and in it a good, kind girl is sent to do a menial, unpleasant or even dangerous task, meets a magical being to whom she is courteous and obliging, and receives a wonderful reward; her bad stepsister is then sent on the same errand, but because she is rude and horrible what she receives is suitably unpleasant and punitive. A famous example of this trope is in ‘Mother Holle’.

In ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’, the wicked stepmother orders the good girl to wear a paper dress and go out into the snow to gather strawberries; far from perishing in the cold, she finds a cottage, shares her one piece of bread with the three little ‘elf-men’ who inhabit it, and clears the snow from their path good-humouredly. Consequently, she is bestowed with the gifts of growing more beautiful every day, having gold coins fall from her mouth when she speaks and marrying a king. The bad stepsister, on the other hand, is sent out in furs and with ‘buttered bread and cake’ to eat, but is so selfish and rude that the three little men punish her with the mirror of the good girl’s rewards: she will grow uglier each day, toads will leap from her mouth whenever she speaks and she will die a miserable death.

This trope functions in several ways: by splitting the young girl character into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ it can act as a rather clumsy reinforcement of ‘approved’ female qualities – obedience, kindness, generosity, diligence – contrasted with the terrible fate which might befall a lazy, saucy, bad-tempered wench. In particular, it highlights the virtue of obedience, which I would argue is the good girl’s main characteristic in the story: she is obedient to father, stepmother, little men and husband, in turn. The good sister’s virtues are rewarded with those features which make a girl most attractive in the marriage market: physical beauty (here reflecting inner beauty) and wealth – and with those gold coins falling from her lips, who will listen to what she actually says?

The girl character ‘splits’ again during the second trope, that of ‘the false bride’, which we saw in ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’. Interpreted like this, the girl’s identity is particularly unstable in this tale. Again, the revenant bride is rescued just in time, and in the first edition of the tales, so Joyce Crick tells us in the Oxford University Press edition, the wicked stepmother and stepsister were also left in the forest to be eaten by wild animals. The barrel of nails was added later, and Wilhelm Grimm justified it as having been described in a thirteenth-century chronicle from the Netherlands. The wicked stepmother inadvertently chooses it as her and her daughter’s punishment in reply to the king’s trick question at the end of the story. Why did Wilhelm change it? To distinguish it slightly from ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’?

(Charles Folkard, illustration, ‘The Three Little Men in the Snow’, illustration for Grimms’ Fairy Tales, London: A&C Black, 1911; from here)

It is of course the details which define this story and elevate it above a simple ‘type’: the paper dress, the strawberries in the snow, swilling the yarn in the icy river. It’s always winter before the king finds the good girl and marries her. The forest is the place of magic and testing, as in so many of the Grimms’ tales; for the good girl it is a refuge, benign; for the wicked, it is threatening, where beasts may devour them. But I think my favourite part is right at the beginning (from the OUP edition):

There was once a man whose wife had died, and there was a woman whose husband had died. Now the man had a daughter, and so did the woman. The girls knew each other, and one day they went for a walk together and afterwards went to the woman’s house. Then the woman said to the man’s daughter: ‘Listen, tell your father I would like to marry him, and when I do you shall wash yourself every morning in milk, and have wine to drink, but my own daughter shall have water to wash in and water to drink.’ The girl went home and told her father what the woman had said. The man said: ‘What shall I do? Marriage is a pleasure, but it’s also a torment.’ At last, because he couldn’t come to a decision, he took off his boot and said: ‘Take it up to the attic, hang it on the big nail there, and pour water into it. If it holds the water, I’ll take a wife again, but if the water runs out, I won’t.’ The girl did as she was told; but the water shrank the hole, and the boot was full to the brim. She told her father what had happened. Then he went upstairs himself, and when he saw that it was so he went to the widow and wooed her, and the wedding took place.

Irresponsible fathers are a feature of the Grimms’ tales, but this one is intriguing. He takes the widow’s promises of kindness to his daughter on trust, but not his own child’s observation of the boot: this he corroborates himself. He uses a boot with a hole in it – did he know this, and so really had decided not to marry? Or was he unaware of it, assuming the boot would probably hold the water, and thus quite keen on the widow? In either case, what did he hope to prove with the boot? Or again, was he, in a story where most of the characters lack any great cunning, incredibly stupid? And why in the attic, does he associate that with the head, the brain?

I’m not sure I’ve written all I want to write about this, or finished thinking about it. But life is short, so I’ll post it anyway. What do you make of it?

Next time: ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

(Black-and-white illustration by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; found here)

Rapunzel

(Illustration by Trina Schart Hyman for Rapunzel, retold by Barbara Rogasky; New York: Holiday House, 1982; found here)

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair
That I may climb without a stair.

That little couplet always jiggles about in my mind when I start thinking about Rapunzel, but when I reread the story in Joyce Crick’s edition, I discovered that nobody says the second line. I wonder where it came from? Well, anyway, to the point, I can report to you that if you think you remember the story of Rapunzel, then you do. There are no surprises, and it is very well known, so I am not going to attempt a précis here. Should you wish to remind yourself, D. L. Ashliman’s translation is here.

In her notes, Joyce explains that the Grimms took their version from a story in Kleine Romane by Friedrich Schulz (1790) and noted ‘doubtless from oral tradition’. Actually, Schulz’s source was Madame de la Force’s ‘Persinette’ (1697); part of her story was based on the first part of Giambattista Basile’s ‘Petrosinella’ in the Pentamerone (1637). You can read a translation of the Basile version here; ‘Persinette’ is not available online (and I haven’t read it either!) but there’s a summary of it by Terri Windling on page 2 of her excellent article here. She writes that the Schulz version is essentially the same as ‘Persinette’, except that his fairy is more sympathetically drawn:

Confronting Rapunzel's pregnancy, she's more Disappointed Mother than Vengeful Fury; and she doesn't throw the prince from the tower — he leaps himself, in a fit of despair.

He also changed the name of the heroine from ‘Parsley’ to ‘Rapunzel’. (What is ‘rapunzel’? There is some dispute. It may be Valerianella locusta, or lamb’s lettuce, which looks like this:

Or it may be rampion, known as Rapunzel-Glockenblume in Germany (Campanula rapunculus), the leaves and root of which used to be eaten, which looks like this:

Or it may possibly be spiked rampion (Phyteuma spicatum), which looks like this:

My favourite contender is rampion, not least because somehow I can imagine longing to eat a radish but not really longing for lamb’s lettuce…) So this is a fairy tale with a very literary history, although there may have been oral versions both preceding and running alongside the printed texts. More generally, there are ‘Maiden in the Tower’ stories in other cultures. The tenth-century Persian tale of Rudāba includes the striking detail of Rudāba lettubg down her hair so that her lover Zāl can climb up the tower to her.

(David Hockney, ‘The Older Rapunzel’, etching with aquatint, from Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm; London : Petersburg Press in association with the Kasmin Gallery, 1970; from here)

It’s hard really to discuss the changes which the Grimms made to Schulz’s story without having read it, and in any case Windling enumerates the differences in her article very clearly, but let this not hold me back. So. The humour is less evident in the Grimms’ tale. Rapunzel decides to weave a ladder of silk with which to escape, and asks the prince to bring her a thread of silk every time he visits her. This is a rather lovely metaphor for the love which they create together. Schulz’s prince is something of a worldly seducer but the Grimms tone this down and their prince offers marriage to Rapunzel the first time he sees her. In the later editions of their Märchen they also tone down a significant development in the relationship between Rapunzel and the prince. In Schulz’s version, the sorceress guess what’s afoot when Rapunzel starts getting fat, but as the Grimms’ Märchen became more popular with children, so the Grimms felt they must remove this evidence of premarital sex from their story, and Rapunzel betrays herself by stupidly asking the sorceress why she’s so much heavier than the prince. (She still has twins after her casting out though, so really the Grimms wasted their time.) This is a shame, since Rapunzel’s pregnancy relates directly to the central concerns of the story as the Grimms themselves perceived it.

In the Grimms’ retelling, the fairy becomes a sorceress, less kindly and forgiving. (Apparently the Grimms felt that fairies were too French. !) When she casts out Rapunzel, she casts her out utterly; she doesn’t continue to plague the lovers as Schulz’s fairy does. She becomes (more explicitly?) a jealous and possessive maternal figure, a contrast to the mother who had given up her baby seemingly without complaint (and the father who handed over his child to save his own life). The sorceress’s love for Rapunzel is so consuming that it is even compared to that of a lover: the story pairs her with the prince, since they both climb the rope of hair, and, in fact, Rapunzel accepts the prince’s proposal of marriage because he is ‘so young and handsome… He’ll love me more than Dame Godmother’. The trimming of the tale’s ending also highlights the balance between the two halves of the story: two pregnancies, two rapunzels – salad and girl – whom the sorceress attempts to keep safely walled up, two men who climb in and rob the sorceress. Twice temptation is yielded to – first the cravings for rapunzel, then – erm, the same thing. But while the parents displace their punishment onto their innocent baby, Rapunzel and her prince accept their penance and are ultimately healed and freed by it.

(Paul O. Zelinsky, illustration for Rapunzel; New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1998; found here)

Next time: ‘The Three Little Men in the Forest’.

(Uncredited illustration in text: Rapunzel by Frances Macdonald, inscribed: ‘AND EVEN NOW A HARSH / VOICE SEEMED TO HANG / ABOUT MY HAIR’, watercolour and gold paint on vellum (1897); State University of New York at Buffalo, found here)

Little Brother and Little Sister

(Illustration by Kay Nielsen from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; from here.)

Like ‘The Pack of No-good, Low-life Ruffians’, ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’ opens by plunging immediately into a conversation:

Little Brother took his Little Sister by the hand and said: ‘Ever since our mother died, we have not had one good hour; our stepmother beats us every day, and when we go to her she kicks us away. The hard leftover crusts of bread are our food, and the little dog under the table is better off than we are: at least she sometimes throws him a tasty bit to eat. God have mercy, if only our mother knew! Come, let us go out into the wide world together.’

No messing about: off they go. It rains, they are sad, they enter a forest and sleep there. But their wicked stepmother follows them and enchants all the streams in the forest. Next morning they are thirsty and search for a brook; when they find one, Little Sister hears it murmuring, ‘Whoever drinks from me will turn into a tiger’ and warns her brother to restrain himself. This happens three times; the third time Little Brother disregards his sister and drinks. He is instantly transformed into a (talking) fawn. (This is lucky for Little Sister: roe deer, unlike tigers and wolves, don’t tend to gobble up little girls for breakfast.) Little Sister weeps, but then she makes him a collar from her golden garter and plaits a rope of rushes with which she leads him further into the forest. They find an abandoned house and begin a rustic existence sustained by nuts, berries, roots etc.

Back at their old home, the wicked stepmother is incandescent at their good fortune. She still wants to harm the siblings, and her own daughter, who is ‘as ugly as night and ha[s] only one eye’, nags away at her and complains that she should have been queen. So the stepmother comes up with a plan. When the new queen has just given birth to a baby boy, the stepmother assumes the form of her waiting-woman, draws a bath for the queen and helps her to the bathroom – then she and the ugly stepdaughter slam and lock the door. ‘[I]n the bath-room they had built such a hellfire that the lovely young queen was soon bound to suffocate.’ Then the stepmother magics her daughter into the form of the queen and shoves her into the bed. But. The stepmother cannot do anything about her daughter’s missing eye. When the king pops in for a visit, the false bride lies on her side while her mother squawks at him to keep the curtains drawn because the queen is still too fragile to look at the light.

That night a nurse is sitting awake by the baby’s cradle. In comes the real queen. She lifts the baby from the cradle and nurses him and cuddles him, strokes the fawn who shares his room and leaves.  The nurse is too frightened to tell anyone. For many nights the visits continue, until the queen speaks:

How fares my child? How fares my roe?
I’ll come but twice, and then no more.

Although the nurse doesn’t reply, she does go the next morning and tell the king, who keeps watch with her the next night but is also afraid to reply to the ghostly queen. On the third night and her last visit he finally cries, ‘You cannot be anyone but my dear wife’. ‘And at that moment, by God’s grace, she received her life again; she was rosy, fresh, and well.’ The stepdaughter is taken to the forest where she is torn to pieces by wild animals and the stepmother is burnt. (These are both fates that the stepmother had envisaged for Little Sister.) With her death, Little Brother is released from the spell and becomes human again.  

There are several tropes in this story which recur in fairy tales. The ‘false bride’ is, Joyce Crick writes, also a feature of ‘Three Little Men in the Forest’; the wicked mother-in-law who claims the new bride is a witch and demands her burning (‘The Twelve Brothers’, ‘The Six Swans’) is surely related. So are the wicked stepmother and horrible stepsister from ‘Mother Holle’. Important events – the encounters with streams, the hunts, the visits of the ghostly queen – come in threes – three sets of threes, in fact. The cottage in the forest is a benign version of the gingerbread house, offering protection instead of danger.

Many, many fairy tales concern themselves with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers; as Marina Warner notes, in From the Beast to the Blonde, ‘bad’ motherhood is often split off from the real mother into the character of the stepmother, because the cruelty of a birth mother is so very shocking and ‘unnatural’ to us, even now. This splitting is sometimes very deliberate: Wilhelm Grimm altered ‘Snow White’ to turn the jealous mother into a stepmother. In ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’, Joyce Crick sees the maternal splitting as being between not the ‘good’ dead mother and the ‘bad’ stepmother, but between the nurturing sister, who cares for the fawn and returns from the dead to nurse her baby, and the malignant stepmother. But this is a tale open to many readings: Ellen Steiber interprets it as concerned with the survival of childhood abuse, and for her the splitting is of the girl figure into the half-blind imposter bride, who has ‘shut down’, and the ‘real’, suppressed, ghost. (You can read her essay in the Journal of Mythic Arts, spring 2007.)

(Illustration by Arthur Rackham from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Little Brother and Little Sister and Other Tales By the Brothers Grimm; London: Constable & Company Ltd, 1917; from here.)

The story certainly does seem interested in identity. Little Brother loses his to the witchy stepmother and it is only restored when she is removed. The king knows Little Sister as the woman he wants to marry as soon as he claps eyes on her, yet after the birth of their son is unable to see that she’s been replaced by a monster/is alienated from herself.  (Postnatal depression?) When at last he recognises her true self, she returns to life.

Next time (I won’t say next week because ! But you never know): Rapunzel.

(Uncredited illustrations: colour illustration by Paul Meyerheim from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen,  1889; from here. Black-and-white illustration by Walter Crane from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane. London: Macmillan & Co., 1882; from here.)

The Nutcracker, by E.T.A. Hoffmann

(Gennady Spirin, my favourite illustrator of ‘The Nutcracker’, no further information given, found here; his website is here)

My daughter, who has just turned three, is obsessed with the ballet ‘The Nutcracker’ as only a very small child can be. For the past few months she has watched it practically every day (when she was ill, sometimes twice a day), and her current favourite version is the Royal Ballet production (with Miyako Yoshida as the Sugar Plum Fairy, Iohna Loots as Clara and Gary Avis as Drosselmeyer). When I’m falling asleep, re-potting house plants or boiling the kettle, Tchaikovsky’s music swirls round my brain… 

Of course, I became curious about the Hoffmann story on which the ballet is based (in a roundabout way: Alexandre Dumas wrote a version of it which is the actual basis of the ballet), and since I had just survived a rather gruelling part of my teacher-training course I clearly deserved rewarding with a new book or two. The Anthea Bell translation (published by Pushkin Press in one of their delightful little volumes along with another of Hoffmann’s stories, ‘The Strange Child’) arrived at exactly the right moment. For the last few weeks I’ve been in a state of inertia – I have two part-written posts languishing on my computer and no energy or inspiration to complete them, and I’m feeling anxious about my course without this anxiety translating into anything as useful as action. So, curling up with a story for which the word ‘charming’ must have been invented was precisely what was in order.

(Dagmar Berková, illustration for ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’, edition published in Prague, 1964; found here)

As with many fairy tales, there’s a lot of plot (although the characters are much more delineated than the characters tend to be in the Grimms’ folk tales) and part of the pleasure of the story is Hoffmann’s inventiveness so I won’t spoil it here by explaining much of what happens. One Christmas the three Stahlbaum children receive the present of a nutcracker doll from Godfather Drosselmeier, a councillor who can repair clocks and make amazing mechanical toys. Drosselmeier is a mysterious figure, both benevolent and slightly sinister, a manipulator perhaps of people as well as toys and, as the teller of the tale of Princess Pirlipat, a possible alter-ego for the narrator-Hoffmann who himself intrudes in the text.

(Maurice Sendak, ‘Drosselmeier’, illustration for Nutcracker, New York: Random House, 1984; found here)

Seven-year-old Marie immediately forms a strong bond with the Nutcracker:

You couldn’t have called him an imposing figure, for his rather long, straight torso was set on thin little legs, and his head seemed far too large. However, his elegant clothes made up for it, showing that he was a cultivated man of good taste. [...] Marie kept gazing at the dear little man, whom she had loved at first sight, and she saw what a kind face he had. His pale-green, slightly protuberant eyes expressed nothing but friendliness and goodwill. And the neat cotton-wool beard on his chin suited the little man very well, setting off the sweet smile of his bright-red mouth.

He is no ordinary Nutcracker, as Drosselmeier later tells her, and Marie is drawn into his struggle with the seven-headed Mouse King and his sad history. Hoffmann manages to write in a way which is both witty and apparently innocent, and this seems perfectly to capture the wonder and sensitivity of children, as well as the frustrations of their dealings with adults (who stupidly will not believe that the Nutcracker can come alive) and the nightmares of which they are capable. The sweetness of the story is balanced by the cruelty with which Mistress Mousie and her children are treated by Princess Pirlipat’s parents, the destruction of the little sugar people, the ingratitude of Pirlipat to Nutcracker and the horror of the abominable Mouse King. After the initial battle with the mouse army, the Mouse King torments Marie night after night, demanding the sacrifice of more and more of her toys as the price of the Nutcracker’s safety:

Oh how anxious poor Marie was that night! She felt something icy pattering up and down her arm, and something rough and disgusting touched her cheek, and there was a squealing and a squeaking in her ear – and she saw the terrible Mouse King sitting on her shoulder, with his seven pairs of blood-red jaws open and slobbering at her, and his teeth grinding and chattering. He hissed at the poor child, who was rigid with fear and horror, ‘Hiss, hiss, beware, beware... won’t go in the trap to feast in there – won’t be caught, not me, hiss hiss! I’ll have your picture books, miss, and your pretty dress too, or I’ll never leave you! Just so that you know, for Nutcracker must go, bitten in two he’ll be, hohoho, hee-hee! Squeak!’

Ugh! Imagine waking up to that!

(Artuš Scheiner, illustration for ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’ in an edition published in 1924 in Prague; found here)

Despite the scoffing of the rest of Marie’s family, it’s very clear that what happens to Marie is ‘real’, not a dream or a story she’s made up, or some sort of hallucination. Hoffmann believed that the Enlightenment represented an attack on the imagination, and his work champions other realities than those which are empirically verifiable, such as the worlds Marie discovers. He wrote the story in 1816 for Fritz and Marie, two of the children of his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig, and as well as naming two of his characters after these ‘real’ children he frequently addresses them directly:

As I was saying, the room was very well furnished, and you may believe me, because I don’t know whether you, my attentive little listener Marie – yes, you know the little Stahlbaum girl’s name is Marie too! – well, as I was going to say, I don’t know whether you too have a little doll’s sofa with flowered upholstery, several dear little chairs, a sweet tea table and above all a very nice, neat little bed where your most beautiful dolls can rest.

further blurring the lines between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, as well as giving the text a playful, chatty tone which perhaps nods to the writing-down of oral fairy tales by the Grimms and others. The playfulness as well as the horror and a streak of cruelty prevent the story from ever threatening to be saccharine, even when Marie visits the Land of Toys and marvels at it:

Soon the sweetest of scents wafted towards them from a wonderful little wood opening up on both sides. There was such a gleaming and a sparkling in the foliage that you could see gold and silver fruits hanging from brightly coloured stems, and the trunks and branches of the trees were adorned with ribbons and bunches of flowers, like happy brides and bridegrooms and their cheerful wedding guests. And when the scent of orange blossom wafted like a gentle breeze, the branches and leaves rustled, and thin, shiny strips of metal foil crinkled and crackled in the air, making a sound like cheerful music, while the sparkling little lights hopped and danced up and down.

Everything seems to be alive, even the lights and the foil (which I suppose makes sense if you are visiting a world in which seemingly inanimate toys and sweets have a vital existence). 

This really is a wonderful story and I insist that every visitor to this blog read it by the end of the year – you owe it to yourselves, dear readers, and you will not be disappointed... (but do take the trouble to find Anthea Bell’s translation as it is obviously superior to other widely available versions).

(Gennady Spirin again, this time the picture was found here)

The Pack of No-Good, Low-Life Ruffians

Back to the Brothers Grimm, and a short tale of rampant naughtiness. I’m not going to type it all out here but you can read a translation of it by D.L. Ashliman (from 2001) here. A Cock and Hen go up the mountain to gather nuts but when dusk comes neither of them wants to carry all the heavy nuts home, so the Cock builds a cart of nutshells, but then neither of them wants to pull the cart... According to the notes at the bottom of the Ashliman translation, this story has been given many different names so you might find it in another collection of Grimms’ tales as ‘The Adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet: How They Went to the Mountains to Eat Nuts’, ‘The Vulgar Crew’ or ‘Riffraff’, to give just a few. The German title is ‘Das Lumpengesindel’ which, apart from being a lovely word in its own right, means something like ‘mob’, ‘riff-raff’ or ‘rabble’.

(Horst Lemke, Die Schönsten Märchen der Brüder Grimm, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lesering, 1965; found here)

Joyce Crick, who translated the Oxford World’s Classics edition which I have, tells us that this one was contributed by August von Haxthausen ‘from the Paderborn region’. An exuberant celebration of out-and-out knavery, it lacks the cruelty of ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’, the other ‘beast fable’ I’ve read in this collection, although I did wince for the poor innkeeper’s face and bum. What carries it along is a certain charm and good humour:

When they [the Cock and Hen riding in the cart drawn by the Duck] had gone part of the way they met a pin and a needle going on foot. These called ‘Stop! Stop!’, saying it would soon be dark as stitch, and they couldn’t go a step further, and the road was so muddy, mightn’t they ride in the cart for a little. They’d been staying at the tailor’s hostel outside the town gate and had lingered over a beer. As they were very thin and didn’t take up much room, Cock let them both get in, but they had to promise not to tread on his toes, nor on Hen’s neither.

The Grimms and Joyce Crick have been at pains here to retain the sense of a storytelling voice (rather than text) through little colloquial touches and it all bounces along with cheery energy – it’s pretty much all narrative, there are no extraneous flourishes. The birds, needle and pin are of course being used to reflect human weaknesses but the storyteller isn’t really condemning them, he’s indulging our fantasies, our wish to identify with the tricksters who take what they want and never have to pay the price. There is a moral at the end, given to the unlucky innkeeper:

Then he made an oath that he would never again take a pack of low-life ruffians into his inn, who would eat his pantry empty, pay not a penny, and on top of that, by way of thanks, get up to all sorts of no good.

But this isn’t his story: it’s a sensible oath for an innkeeper but I think most of us have flown away with the fowls.

(Edited to add: I’ve just remembered that it’s April Fool’s Day, so a good moment to be thinking of misrule, tricksters and ne’er-do-weels.)

Next week: ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’.

The Twelve Brothers

(Charles Folkard, illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, London: A&C Black, 1911; found here)

Hello from a snowy Belgium, where we have been busy cultivating chilblains, building snowmen and rescuing straying hens from snow drifts. Oh, and reading fairy tales! After ‘The Good Bargain’, we return now to a story of the sort we expect from the Grimms, with murderous family members, animal transformations and forests. Hurrah!

 If the thirteenth child you bring into the world is a girl, the twelve boys shall die, so that her wealth shall be great and the kingdom shall be hers alone.

Indeed, he’s even had twelve little coffins made and stored in a locked room, ‘and in each there lay a pillow for the dead’. Fonder than he of her existing children, the queen warns the youngest, Benjamin, of the king’s intentions and tells him to take his brothers and hide in the forest. When the thirteenth child is born, the queen will raise a flag on the top of a tower: if the baby is a boy, the flag will be white and the boys may safely return, if red then they must flee for their lives. She adds:

I will rise every night and pray for you: in winter that you may have a fire to warm you, in summer that you may not pine away in the heat.

The boys hide in the forest and after twelve days a red flag ‘of blood’ is raised. Angry, the brothers (all except Benjamin) vow:

Are we supposed to suffer death on account of a girl? We swear that we shall take our revenge: wherever we find a girl, her red blood shall flow.

The boys venture deeper into the forest, and ‘where it was darkest’ they find a cottage with a spell upon it. They move in. The eleven older brothers hunt for game every day while Benjamin keeps house.

Thus ten years pass until, back at the castle, there’s a particularly big wash-day. The young princess, who is ‘kind of heart and fair of face’, with a golden star in the middle of her forehead, observes twelve little white shirts bobbing on the line. She asks her mother to whom they belong, and her mother says, oh, your twelve brothers you don’t know about. She tells the princess about them and shows her the twelve coffins. The princess tells her not to weep, she will find her brothers.

The princess takes the twelve shirts and walks into the forest. She reaches the cottage, where she finds Benjamin, and they quickly realise that they must be brother and sister. Benjamin warns her of the other brothers’ murderous vow, and hides her. When the boys return home, he extracts from them a promise that they won’t kill the first girl they see, and then explains that their sister is there. Much rejoicing, and the sister says she will stay with them. She washes their sheets white, and seems to introduce a few vegetables to their diet.

Everything is fine until… Had you forgotten the cottage was enchanted? In the garden twelve lilies (‘that some call “student lilies”’), and the sister picks them to give them to her brothers as a treat. Oops! Immediately the boys turn into twelve ravens and fly away, and the cottage and garden vanish, leaving the sister alone in the wild wood with an old woman. The lilies were the brothers, explains the old woman, and:

there is no remedy in the world but one, but that is so hard that you will not be able to save them with it, for you must be silent for seven years. You may not speak, nor laugh, and if you utter a single word, and there is only one hour of the seven years left to run, it will all be in vain, and your brothers will be killed by that one word.

The girl vows in her heart, ‘I know for sure I will save my brothers.’ She climbs up a tall tree and sits there, silently, spinning, until one day a king is out hunting in the forest, claps eyes on her, falls in love and asks her to marry him. She gives a little nod. At their wedding she neither speaks nor laughs. The king’s mother, ‘a wicked woman’, begins to slander the new queen, saying someone who behaves as she does must have a ‘bad conscience’ and accusing her of all sorts of crimes until her son ‘allowed himself to be persuaded and condemned her to death’. Although he does have the decency to weep as she is bound to the stake and the fire is lit. Luckily, just as the flames are licking her dress, the seven years expire, and the ravens arrive and turn into young men who liberate their sister. Now she is free to speak and explain to her husband why she was silent. Everyone lives happily ever after – oh, except the wicked mother-in-law, who is thrown into a barrel of boiling oil and poisonous snakes and comes to a nasty end.

(John B. Gruelle, illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, translated by Margaret Hunt, New York: Cupple & Leon, 1914; found here; I must say those ravens look a little too far off, considering how high the flames are leaping)

So. This was one of the first tales the Grimms collected. Another of their tales, ‘The Seven Ravens’, features a girl who sets forth to rescue her transformed brothers. ‘The Six Swans’ is even closer: the heroine must remain silent for six years and sew six shirts from star-flowers (could there be ‘traces’ here of the white shirts the princess sees in the laundry, the golden star on her forehead?); she’s also discovered in a tree by a king who is in search of a wife and in possession of an evil mother. There are parallels with the second part of ‘Our Lady’s Child’ too, and, as we shall see, with biblical stories. Fairy tales seem to be allusive, or at least fond of recycling. But a king who wants to murder all his sons so that a girl can inherit everything? That is something else.

It seems to me that the tale is bookended by two stories of parents threatened by children: first the father who will destroy his sons, then the Bad Mother(-in-law) who perceives her daughter(-in-law) as a rival who must be eliminated. Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde, noted that in older versions of some fairy tales like ‘Snow White’, the mother who initially loves her daughter becomes jealous and murderous when the girl reaches puberty. Since later audiences found this distasteful, the Bad Mother was split away into a stepmother while the original Good Mother died during the girl’s infancy, her virtue intact. So, perhaps, in ‘The Twelve Ravens’, we can see two faces of motherhood. The dangerous, Bad Mother is now the mother-in-law who exerts control over her rather weak son. Interestingly, there is no balancing Good Father to the Bad Father of the king at the beginning of the tale, and while the Bad Mother is punished with rather cheery gruesomeness, the king seems to escape retribution (although he does lose all his heirs, someone else pays for his crime). The Good Mother, on the other hand, loses all her children and never knows their fates. I thought there was a lot of loneliness in this tale, hers not least.

(H.J. Ford, illustration from The Red Fairy Book, London: Longmans and Co., 1890; found here)

Most of the action is initiated by women: the mother-figures and the old woman do so through their use words to persuade and advise, the young princess through her actions, seeking the boys and plucking the lilies. This gender distinction may be reinforced by the use of colour in the tale. The white shirts, the white sheets, the (perhaps, I couldn’t find ‘student-lilies’ described or pictured anywhere) white lilies – white is the colour associated with the boys, the colour of innocence and purity. White lilies were often associated with martyrs in Christian art. In contrast, red is the colour of girls, signalled through the red flag. It’s the colour of the ‘blood’ (hymenal or other) of the girls the brothers swear they will let ‘flow’, maybe also the flames of the fire which nearly consume the princess, the colour of experience, of passion and power.

However, the princess ceases to take the initiative once she has chosen to save her brothers. The rescue is effected through her passivity, her silence. It’s a sort of death, a death which somehow fulfils the brothers’ vow to kill girls and redresses the imbalance caused by the father’s promise to kill the boys, while restoring her brothers to their human form. When she gathers the lilies and the boys turn into ravens, we are reminded that her very existence threatened theirs. It is also a moment when, though innocent herself, she assumes the responsibility for her father’s crime and takes on the penance for it. The younger generation are both victims and redeemers of their parents. I think this story is a palimpsest, and beneath it we can discern both the story of Christ’s death and resurrection and the story of Joseph (Benjamin, we are explicitly informed, was named ‘according to the Bible’). Joseph’s brothers tried to kill him out of jealousy because he was the favoured son, but he went on to be greater than any of them and to forgive them; while much of the narrative is very different from that of ‘The Twelve Ravens’ the theme of punishment and forgiveness is a link.

What do you think?

(Decorations by Walter Crane from Household Stories from the Collection of the Bros. Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane, London: Macmillan and Co., 1886, found here)

Next week(ish): ‘The Pack of No-good, Low-life Ruffians’.