a gallimaufry

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’.

 

The Good Bargain

It grieves me to start a fresh year with a tale I don’t like, but ‘The Good Bargain’, the seventh in Joyce Crick’s edition of the Grimms’ Selected Tales (Oxford World’s Classics, 2005), has that honour. Joyce doesn’t seem to care for it either, calling it ‘scarcely a Märchen’ and ‘a crude rustic tale’.  A countryman sells his cow at market for seven talers; on the way home he passes a pond where the frogs croak ‘eex, eex’. The countryman assures them that no, he didn’t receive six talers but seven; however, the wayward frogs persist with their ‘eex, eex’ so the countryman hurls his money into the pond to show them. Even this doesn’t change the frogs’ minds, and they don’t return the money either.

(Hermann Vogel, charming illustration for ‘The Good Bargain’, in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, n.d. (München: Verlag von Braun u. Schneider) found here)

A short time later, the countryman slaughters another of his cows and sets off for the town. A dog is barking at a gate, ‘Bow wow, what now?’ The countryman talks to him, the dog only ever replying ‘Bow wow, what now?’, and gives him the meat to take to the butcher. No sooner has he turned away, than the dog and all his fellows devour it. Three days later, the countryman has still not received his money from the dog so he goes straight to the butcher and requests his money – the butcher drives him away with a broom.

Angrily, the countryman sets off for the palace to demand justice. He pours out his tale to the king and the princess, who laughs. The king is delighted and says:

I cannot give you justice here, but instead you shall have my daughter as your wife: all her life long she has never laughed, except just now at you, and I have promised her to the one who would make her laugh.

However, the countryman declines the offer – he already has a wife at home and she’s quite enough of a handful! Insulted, the king declares he will give him another reward and orders him to return in three days to receive five hundred. When the countryman steps out of the chamber, he is accosted by a sentry who is impressed that he made the princess laugh. A peasant, says the sentry, won’t know what to do with all that money, why doesn’t he share it? The countryman agrees and tells him that two hundred are his – in three days’ time he may claim them from the king. A Jew is standing nearby and overhears the conversation; he runs after the countryman and offers to exchange the remaining three hundred into small coins for him. To this too the countryman agrees. The Jew is to go to the king in three days’ time; meanwhile he gives the countryman the small coin (which is bad – three of his groschen are worth two normal ones).

Three days later, the countryman, the sentry and the Jew go to the king for the reward. The king orders the countryman to remove his coat, but the latter explains that he’s given his reward to the other two. Of course, the ‘reward’ is a beating – the sentry accepts his with dignity while the Jew does not. The king is amused by the countryman and orders him to fill his pockets with gold from the treasury. Afterwards the countryman, followed by the Jew, goes to a tavern and grumbles that he cannot know the worth of the money because the ‘rogue of a king’ didn’t give it to him personally; he’s been tricked. The Jew rushes to inform the king of the countryman’s disrespect. The king flies into another rage and shouts at the Jew to fetch the countryman. However, the countryman refuses to go unless he has a new coat; now that he has money it would be improper to stand before a monarch in rags. The Jew, afraid that the king’s anger will dissipate, lends the countryman his finest coat. Before the king, the countryman is charged with his own ‘wicked’ words, to which he replies:

Oh, [...] what a Jew says is always a lie; he never lets a word of truth leave his mouth. That fellow there is capable of saying that I’m wearing his coat.

The Jew protests that he is wearing his coat; the king reflects that the Jew must have deceived one of them and has him beaten again, and the countryman returns home with the money and the fine coat and says to himself, ‘This time I made it!’

To the modern reader, the anti-Semitism is a depressing reminder of prevailing attitudes in Europe, attitudes which lasted so very long. The comedy has not worn well either, in my opinion at least. Motifs from other tales appear in the tale – the naïve hero who succeeds despite himself (as for instance in ‘The Tale of the Boy Who Set Out to Learn Fear’), the princess who is the reward for the completed task (and in ‘The Golden Goose’ there is another princess who cannot laugh), the use of trickery. Perhaps we could see it as a rude retort to some of the other tales, a story with some at least of the ‘right’ components for a ‘tale’, but with the magical shine rubbed off and a more cynical undercoat showing through. What do you think?

Next week: ‘The Twelve Brothers’.

Back soon

I’m rather like the child in the picture at the moment, so it might be a week or two before I wander back here. I have a bristly great forest of work and just have to keep on through it. Soon things will be better though! In the mean time, sorry I haven’t been commenting on everyone’s blogs recently; I will be back...

(The fabulous Mervyn Peake, illustration for ‘Our Lady’s Child’, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946; reprinted by the British Library, 2012); found here)

Faithful John

(Walter Crane, illustration for ‘Faithful John’, in the Brothers Grimm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Bros. Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886) found here)

‘Faithful John’ was, for me, another unfamiliar tale from the Grimms despite containing motifs recognisable from other stories such as Bluebeard and The Six Swans. It begins with an old, dying king who entrusts his son to his most loyal servant, Faithful John. (With a name like that it was lucky that he turned out to be indeed loyal!) Faithful John replies, ‘I will not desert him and I will serve him faithfully, even if it costs me my life.’ Well actually... The king adds:

After my death you are to show him all round the whole palace, all the chambers, halls, and vaults and all the treasures in them; but you are not to show him the last room in the golden corridor where the portrait of the Princess of the Golden Roof is hidden. If he catches sight of that picture he will be filled with an ardent love for her, he will fall into a faint, and for her sake he will come into great danger; you must protect him from that.

It may not surprise you that after the death of the old king and the tour of his palace, the new king starts to notice that there is one room to which he is never admitted. When challenged, Faithful John prevaricates: ‘There is something inside it [...] which will fill you with terror.’ He tells the king of his promise to his father and warns that great misfortune will befall them both if he opens the door – Faithful John already takes his responsibility so seriously that he identifies his destiny with the young king’s. But his master insists and so Faithful John unlocks the door and nips in first so that he can cover up the portrait – but alas, the painting is placed in such a way that you see it as soon as you enter, and the king peers over Faithful John’s shoulder, sees the princess and faints away. Revived, he says, ‘My love for her is so great that if all the leaves on the trees were tongues, they could not express it. I will hazard my life to gain her. You are my most loyal John: you must help me.’

So John advises the king to melt down all the gold in his treasury and have it made into splendid bowls and vases and little statues of animals, and then the two of them dress as merchants and sail to the town where the Princess of the Golden Roof lives. Faithful John goes to the palace and gains admittance to the princess via her chambermaid. He shows the princess some of the gold objects, which delight her, and lures her onto the ship of his ‘rich master’ to see the rest. No sooner has the princess set foot on board than the crew weighs anchor and they set sail; the princess does not notice at first because she is absorbed in examining the golden trinkets, but then:

‘Oh!’ she cried in terror, ‘I have been deceived. I have been carried off and fallen into a merchant’s clutches. I would sooner die!’

Fortunately, however, on being reassured that the lowly rich merchant is in fact a king, she finds that ‘her heart inclined towards him so that she gladly agreed to be his consort.’

Meanwhile, Faithful John, ‘who was sitting forward in the ship and making music’, overhears the conversation of three ravens. From this he learns that when the king reaches land a fine chestnut horse will gallop towards him, but if he mounts it, it will fly away with him and ‘he will never see his maiden again’, unless someone else jumps on the horse first, whips a pistol from the holster in the saddle and shoots it in the head. After that, the ravens tell each other, the king will reach his palace and find a wedding-shirt which looks as if it is woven from gold and silver lying in a bowl, but it is actually made of brimstone and pitch and when he puts it on ‘it will burn him down to the marrow and the bone’; the remedy is for someone else, wearing gloves, to seize it and cast it into the fire. But then, after the wedding, during the dancing, the new queen will fall to the ground as if dead and will only be saved if someone lifts her up, sucks three drops of blood from her right breast and spits them out again. If anyone who knows any of this tells the king, that person will be turned to stone.

The ravens fly off. Faithful John is ‘still and sad’, but resolves to save his master even if it costs him his own life.

(Walter Crane, as previous caption)

Everything happens as the ravens foretold, but each time Faithful John intervenes, killing the horse, burning the shirt and saving the queen. On the first two occasions, when the courtiers protest at his behaviour, the king defends him: ‘Who knows what good that did? Let him be, he is my most loyal John.’ But the incident with the queen’s breast, well, I think we can all see that this might be open to misinterpretation and thus be unsurprised that the king flies into a rage and has Faithful John thrown into gaol. However, the king also condemns his loyal servant to death the very next morning without a chance to defend himself. At the gallows Faithful John explains his conduct and is turned to stone. The penitent king has the statue placed in his bedchamber beside his bed and weeps whenever he looks at it: ‘Oh, if only I could bring you back to life, my most loyal John!’ Despite this he and his wife manage to have twins.

One morning the queen is at church and the two little boys are playing by their father, who is weeping and wishing her could restore Faithful John to life, when the statue speaks and says that he can be reanimated – if the king sacrifices what he holds most dear. ‘If you chop off the heads of your two children with your own hand, and anoint me with their blood, I shall regain my life.’ The king is horrified, but reasons that Faithful John had died for him, so he beheads his sons and besmears the statue with their blood; at once Faithful John is alive again. He tells the king, ‘Your faithfulness shall not go unrewarded’, sets the heads back on the boys and they too come back to life. The king then hides all three in a big cupboard. When the queen returns from church she says that ‘all the time I was thinking of Faithful John and how we brought such misfortune upon him’. The king then explains the dilemma to her: Faithful John can be restored to life at the cost of their two sons. ‘The queen grew pale and her heart was seized with sudden fear, but she said, “We owe it to him on account of his great loyalty.”’ Having passed the test, her sons and Faithful John are all revealed to her. ‘Then they lived together in happiness until the end of their days.’

(Hermann Vogel, illustration for ‘Der treue Johannes’, in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, n.d. (München: Verlag von Braun u. Schneider) found here); Faithful John, who looks far too old to be leaping on fine chestnut horses, is showing some golden trinkets to one of the princess’s servants to persuade her to admit him to her mistress’s presence)

On the surface, this tale urges us to be loyal. The narrative can only conclude when the king has shown Faithful John something of the loyalty that the servant has shown to him, and thus it insists that loyalty is reciprocal. But while the king’s ingratitude is lamentable, the price exacted by the maligned servant is high. Could the story be a demand that monarchs place duty to subjects before personal life and family? Should we value loyalty as highly as the characters in this story? They all flourished because of it.

As is the way with these tales, other readings may exist. There is surely an echo here of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, which is an example of obedience perhaps rather than loyalty. Does Faithful John demand a measure of obedience too? He takes on the rôle of parent or guide to the young king on the death of the father. He advises him as a father might. For much of the story, he acts as the hero – he plans the abduction of the Princess of the Golden Roof and carries it out, he saves the king and princess from death and shows himself to be quick-witted, thoughtful and physically strong. He, the father figure, is the perfect king and prevents the real king from doing anything for himself. The king is entirely passive until he turns on Faithful John and condemns him to death. This is his only decisive act in the story, for even his own chance at heroism (if sacrificing your children is heroic, which I think in the terms of this story it is supposed to be) is dictated by Faithful John. The story demonstrates that his bond with Faithful John is more powerful than his bond with his children. (So is the queen’s, interestingly.)

I hate to always be going on about sex in connexion with fairy tales, but I can’t help but notice the juxtaposition of marital bed containing the beautiful Princess of the Golden Roof and the grim, silent statue of Faithful John. It is as if, on his wedding day, the son finally rebelled against the parental figure, explosively, too violently, and in return the parent went into a massive sulk, casting a shadow over everything, angry but refusing to be put aside in favour of the wife. And what to make of the princess, lover of gold things, perhaps a snob, perhaps a victim of Stockholm Syndrome? Why does she feel loyalty to Faithful John?

I’ve seen a Jungian interpretation of this story mentioned on the Internets, with Faithful John as the young king’s shadow and the princess as his anima; could anyone explain this further? It looks fascinating but I know next to nothing about Jung; I’d love to learn more.

Next week: The Good Bargain.

The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats

Somewhat to my surprise after rereading ‘The Frog King’ for this project, ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’ proved to be exactly the same as I remember from the Ladybird edition I read as a child way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. For that reason I’m not going to bother with a synopsis – if you think you remember the story, you do. (If you’d like a reminder though, you can read it here which is also the source of the charming picture to the right of this paragraph.) It was never one of my favourites and for this I blame R. Lumley, illustrator of the Ladybird edition; despite the scariness of the wolf, the horror of the little kids being devoured and the devastation of the nanny goat on her return, child-Helen felt more sympathy for the horrible wolf than the resourceful goat family (whose peril passed me by so that they seemed stupid and rather smug and endlessly skipping about in a mindless fashion; see whether or not you agree with me). Reading the Oxford World Classics edition without the pictures is a very different experience. Sometimes (no offence meant directly to you, R. Lumley, properly terrifying pictures would not really have been quite the thing for books intended for three-year-olds) illustrations do get in the way of a story.

I could not help thinking of the story of Little Red Riding Hood or Little Redcap (also ‘little’, also contemplated by a wolf for her potential as dinner) and I flicked ahead to see that the Grimms included two versions in their collection, in one of which the woodcutter cuts open the sleeping wolf to release Little Redcap and her grandmother; they then fill the wolf’s belly with stones and he comes to an unfortunate end. In the second version the grandmother outwits the wolf with the help of Little Redcap. I was also reminded of the Three Little Pigs; the houses of two of them proved insufficient to protect them from the wolf but the third little pig was too clever for him. Wolves may be terrifying predators, but they are not invincible. (They are also talented female impersonators – as grandmother or as nanny-goat.)

(Walter Crane, illustration for ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids’, in the Brothers Grimm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Bros. Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886) found here)

The nanny-goat warns the kids:

[B]e on your guard against the wolf, for if he comes in he’ll gobble you up, every last morsel. The villain often pretends to be someone else, but you’ll recognize him at once by his hoarse voice and his black feet.

Although the little goats follow their mother’s instructions, they carelessly reveal their safeguards to the wolf:

[Y]ou’re not our mother! She has a sweet high voice, but your voice is hoarse [...] Our mother hasn’t a black foot like yours; you’re the wolf!

and focus on the details (voice, foot) rather than using their common sense. Thus they seal their own doom. But then they are children! Fortunately for them they have a clever mother to rescue them. For this is essentially a tale about the resourcefulness and courage of mothers, as signalled in the opening sentence with its seemingly redundant second phrase: ‘There was once an old nanny-goat who had seven little goats, and she loved them as a mother loves her children.’

And where is the father in all this? Is the wolf the father, the violent and jealous parent? Another devouring father was Kronos, who ate five of his children; the sixth, Zeus, was hidden by his mother Rhea, who substituted a stone for him. Zeus later defeated his father, cut open his belly (in some versions; in others he used an emetic) and released his brothers and sisters (and the stone). Thus the cannibal father has Form. The other men in the story – the grocer, the baker and the miller – give the wolf what he needs even though the miller at least knows the wolf’s reputation for hoodwinking people because they are afraid. Creatures like the wolf need a wider network of people turning a blind eye in order to succeed.

What are your impressions?

(This wolf on the left, with knife and pistol, is leaving nothing to chance: Hermann Vogel, illustration for ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids’, in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, n.d. (München: Verlag von Braun u. Schneider) found here)

Next week (I hope with a bit more zing to my post): Faithful John.

The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear

(Karl Fahringer, ‘The Boy who Went Forth to Learn Fear’; I don’t know the edition it originally appeared in but I found it here)

I’m sorry – this is appearing a day late! The teacher-training course has crashed over my head like a monster Flemish-language wave and I am floundering. I’m also teaching English one evening a week and that’s turned out to be hard work too. So, writing time is short here at a gallimaufry these days. 

But onward! There are two brothers, the younger of whom is stupid, unable to learn anything and unable to experience fear: ‘They keep on saying, “It makes my flesh creep! It makes my flesh creep!” My flesh doesn’t creep: likely it’s another of those skills I don’t understand.’ When his father asks him what trade he would like to learn, the boy answers that he’d like to learn ‘flesh-creeping’. The father complains about this to the sexton, who offers to take the boy on and teach him flesh-creeping, which he attempts to do by pretending to be a ghost: the boy mistakes him for a ne’er-de-well and kicks him down the stairs, breaking his leg. Deeply embarrassed and annoyed, the father gives his son fifty thalers and turns him out of the house to seek his fortune, warning him never to mention from where he comes or whom his father is. A man on the road offers to teach him flesh-creeping by instructing him to spend the night beneath a gibbet, but the boy is unafraid and even takes the corpses down and sits them by the fire so they can warm themselves. At an inn he learns of a haunted castle: anyone who can spend three nights there will win the hand of the king’s daughter. As yet no-one has emerged alive.

The boy takes up the challenge, asking only for ‘a fire, a turner’s bench and a wood-carver’s bench with a knife’. On the first night he encounters black cats who wish to play cards with him, black cats and dogs on red-hot chains who stamp on his fire and a moving bed which whisks him round the castle. The boy remains imperturbable. He kills the animals and taunts the bed before settling down to sleep by his fire. On the second night, a fearful racket in the chimney precedes half a man, who drops down it, followed a little later by the second half; he is followed by more men who start playing bowls with nine shinbones and two skulls. The boy joins in their game after using the turner’s lathe to smoothe the skulls into spheres. On the third night six tall men bring in a coffin which the boy opens; thinking the corpse is just cold he tries to warm him and then climbs into bed with him. The corpse revives and tries to throttle him, so the boy pushes him back into the coffin. Then a terrifying old man enters and tells him he will die, but the boy traps him and beats him until the old man offers him great riches. He takes him to three large chests brimming with gold, one for the poor, one for the king and one for himself. Midnight strikes and the old man disappears. The king is delighted and gives him his daughter to marry. ‘That’s all fine and good [...] but I still don’t know what flesh-creeping is’, objects the boy.

(David Hockney, ‘Inside the Castle’, etching, 1969,  from ‘The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear’ in Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (London, Petersburg Press, 1970; reprinted London: Royal Academy of Art, 2012), found here)

Once married, the boy is happy but still whinges on that he wishes he knew what flesh-creeping was, to the point where his wife becomes understandably annoyed. Her chambermaid brings her a bucketful of little fishes, and instructs her to pull aside the coverlet and pour them over the boy one night when he’s asleep: this she does and thus he finally learns what flesh-creeping (or ‘shuddering’ in other translations) really is.

Like many fairy tales, this one takes an apparent outsider or person without much power to be its a hero. The boy is explicitly referred to as ‘stupid’ by the narrator and by other characters in the story; however, as it unfolds he is shown not to be lacking in advantages. He is resourceful in the face of trials, cheery, kind (albeit to corpses) and physically strong. The innkeeper’s wife notes his ‘pretty eyes’ and the king calls him ‘a handsome boy’. Forced to discard his identity, his old self, when he leaves home, he manages without magical helpers and endures his ordeals alone. It is probably stretching a point too far to bring Asperger’s Syndrome into this, but I will anyway because I felt that the boy did display the Aspie ability to interpret the world differently to others and very literally; his father cannot accept this difference nor perceive the strengths it gives his son.

My friend Joyce writes that ‘The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear’ appeared in the first edition of the tales as ‘Good Bowling and Card Playing’, with just the triple test of the cats, the game of bowls and the scary old man: ‘the important mythical element of learning fear was only introduced in the extensive rewriting for the second edition’ which drew on at least four other variants of the story. The hero of the first edition was a standard bold hero. Joyce further points out:

[I]t is essentially a comedy on two levels: on one, the boy remains cheerfully and stupidly proof against three times three horrors; on another, like Wagner’s equally sanguine Siegfried, he does learn fear – from his bride; at least, as a figure in the Märchen, he does not learn fear within himself. But it is characteristic of the Märchen genre that the inward experience – fear, and with it becoming an adult – is represented by the wholly external episode of the shudder-making bucket of fishes.

And there is another sort of joke going on here. The external experience of shuddering or flesh-creeping is for most of the story linked with expressing fear and, moreover, fear of the supernatural and the undead. But the boy’s flesh finally creeps not through fear but through disgust at the cold little wriggling fishes. (I do wish that Emily were still posting as I would love to know her thoughts about this.) Different elements of fear are being conflated to end comically – spending the night fighting enormous black cats is as nothing compared to your wife tipping gudgeon over your head. The marital bed is the counterpoint of the moving bed in the haunted castle, which tries to terrify the boy but fails to provoke him. Or is it disgust that he feels at the end? Marina Warner (From the Beast to the Blonde) and Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment), considering that the shudders are occurring in bed with the queen, interpret them as physical passion. Bettelheim reads the tale as that of a young man who learns to feel, whether it be fear or something else. What do you think?

Next week: The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats.

Our Lady’s Child

One sunny day a good frau was preparing the morning story for her children. But every tale she pulled out of the cupboard was somehow unsatisfactory, lacking in nutrition and moral fibre. Liberally sprinkled with elves and talking animals and very dubious behaviour, they would not sustain her offspring through a rigorous day at school. Fortunately the frau was resourceful; she whipped out her cooking pot, hung it over the fire and began to make a delicious soup. In she threw a handful of ‘Bluebeard’, a spoonful of ‘Six Swans’ and a dash of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, perhaps even a dusting of ‘Genesis’, and she simmered it all in a delicious broth of Catholicism.

I believe that’s the origin of this tale. A poor woodcutter and his wife have a lovely daughter; alas they’re poor and starving but Our Lady appears to the man while he’s working in the woods one day and tells him to bring his child to her and she will care for her as a mother. So he fetches the little girl, and Our Lady takes her up to heaven and it’s just great: ‘She had cake to eat and sweet milk to drink, and clothes made of gold, and the little angels to play with.’ When the girl is fourteen years old, Our Lady has to leave on unspecified business and hands over the keys to the thirteen doors of heaven; she may open all but one. Of course, the girl disobeys:

Now the forbidden door was the only one left, and she felt a great longing to know what was hidden behind it and she said to the little angels: ‘I won’t open it all the way, and I won’t go in, but I will unlock it, so that we can see through the crack just a little.’ ‘Oh no,’ said the little angels, ‘that would be a sin; the Virgin Mary has forbidden it, and it could well be your misfortune.’

(My friend Joyce writes that all the dialogue was added by the Grimms and I love the way the girl minimises her naughtiness – ‘I won’t open it all the way...’ – and involves her friends, assuming that they will want to have a peek too, there’s a real flavour of children’s behaviour there; I also love the prissiness of the little angels’ response.)

Behind the thirteenth door is the Trinity, ‘radiant and fiery’, and the girl not only gazes at it in wonder but puts out her finger and touches it, staining her finger indelibly gold. When Our Lady returns and asks for the keys, she asks the girl three times if she has disobeyed her – the evidence of the gold finger is pretty damning – but the girl persists in denying this. So she’s cast out of heaven into the wilderness and rendered mute. Life is miserable and involves a lot of eating of berries and lacking of clothes, but after a few years a king rides by, falls in love with her and takes her home to be his queen. Each year for the following three years she is brought to bed with child, and shortly after she has given birth Our Lady appears to her, returns to her the power of speech briefly and asks her to confess her sin – otherwise Our Lady will take her baby away. And each time the queen denies that she opened the third room and loses her child. Unpleasant rumours about cannibalism circulate and after the third occasion the king’s counsellors prevail upon him to have her burned at the stake. But the flames melt ‘the hard ice of her pride’ and in the nick of time she repents and shouts out, ‘Yes, Mary, I did open the door!’ A sudden cloudburst extinguishes the flames and Our Lady pops down with the three children and tells everyone, ‘Whosoever repents of their sin and confesses it is forgiven.’

What I find striking about this tale is the role of Our Lady. The villains – the witch in the gingerbread cottage, Bluebeard/Fitcher, the queen mother from many stories including ‘The Six Swans’ and some versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – are replaced by the Virgin Mary, not usually noted for her cruelty. (Or child-snatching.) Acts which are evil in the other stories are used to good ends here, but it is perhaps a risky narrative strategy to associate Mary with the abuse of power. But I think you can also reflect them back and see ‘Our Lady’s Child’ as commenting on, interpreting, the stories from which it cherry-picks. By using these elements* as moral trials and just punishments, the storyteller implicitly points to their use in the original tales as testing experiences which spur some sort of emotional or moral growth. It’s a story that understands the power of other stories and does not make the mistake of dismissing them as ‘fairy tales’ of no worth.

The Catholic framework connects ‘Our Lady’s Child’, a story of a fall from grace through disobedience, pride and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, with Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. In the tale’s Christian age, of course, salvation is possible (with the help of the Church) through repentance. It’s a retelling of the Fall of Man with the happy ending of the New Testament tacked onto it. Suffering and even being burned at the stake are unimportant in the face of eternity. Yet it can also perhaps be read as the enactment of a mother–daughter conflict: the girl reaching adolescence and needing to assert her independence, which she chooses to do through disobedience and lying. (There are better ways to prove you are your own person, but then I imagine that Mary might be a little overwhelming as a mother.) Other stories which dramatise power struggles between (step)mothers and daughters tend to end with the daughter triumphant; here the mother’s potency is challenged but not overthrown. Fitting, of course, as a vehicle for a Church which emphasised the importance of obedience in Christian life.

Next week: The Tale of the Boy who Set Out to Learn Fear

* Admittedly the correspondence of Mary with the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’ isn’t used in this way, but she is the witch’s direct opposite, a nurturing rather than a devouring mother, as Bettelheim might put it.

(First illustration above: Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban, ‘Marienkind’, in Grimm’s Märchen, Vienna: M. Munk, 1905; found here. Second illustration, O. Herrfurth [?], found here; for a properly Catholic flavour!)

Cat and Mouse as Partners

This beast fable is not one I’d encountered before. A cat and mouse decide to keep house together and they purchase a pot of lard to keep for the winter. To secure it from thieves they stow it under the altar of the church. Soon the cat begins to hanker after the lard and, telling the mouse that she must attend a christening as a godmother, she creeps away three times and eats some of the lard until it is all finished up. Each time, on her return, she tells the mouse about her godchildren and gives their names: Skinoff, Halfgone and Allgone. The mouse’s suspicions are increasingly roused by these odd names but, as the cat says, ‘It’s no worse than “Crumb-thief”, as your godchildren are called’, and she makes no connexion with the pot of lard. Come winter, cat and mouse run short of food they can forage and the mouse suggests they fetch the pot of lard.

‘Oh,’ said the mouse, ‘now I see what’s happened; now it’s coming to light; you’re a real true friend. You ate it all up while you were godmother; first the skin off, then half gone, then ...’ ‘You’d better be quiet,’ cried the cat. ‘One word more and I’ll eat you up.’ ‘All gone’ was already on the tip of the poor mouse’s tongue. It was scarcely out of her mouth when the cat leapt at her, seized her, and gobbled her up. There, you see, that’s the way of the world.

My friend and trusty guide Joyce Crick tells me that this was one of the very first tales which Wilhelm noted down, in 1808, and that he received it from his neighbour, Gretchen Wild. She adds:

He overhauled it completely for the third edition of 1837, transforming a laconic anecdote into a short story conveyed by means of dialogue with full characterization of the figures and their relationship. The presence of an oral story-teller is cunningly suggested by the worldly moral uttered in the very last line – but that was not added until the fourth edition of 1840.

In 1856 Wilhelm published a revised edition of notes which included one to this tale pointing to similar stories in other countries – Lower Pomerania, Norway and ‘Africa’. Thus the literary history of ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’ shows in microcosm how unafraid the Grimms were to improve their original material in a way that would horrify oral historians now (and I don’t use quote marks around ‘improve’ because I think these changes do make the story more interesting and effective, sorry oral historians of the world); it also ends, as shown in that note, with interest in folklore expanding to become international.

Wandering right off the point here, I found in Joyce’s introduction the answer to something which had been puzzling me about the Grimms’ compilation of tales. I couldn’t understand how they could have been so certain that the stories they collected were echt German and did not originate elsewhere; equally I found the enthusiasm for shaping the stories into more literary artefacts at odds with their presentation as tales told to the brothers by old German peasant women. Joyce, however, tells us that the brothers were well aware that the folk-tales existed in other traditions, and that their original aim was to recover motifs – not only from folk-tales, but also from old printed romances, folk-songs, even jurisprudence – which recurred through the centuries: these enduring motifs would show something about the German people, I suppose what they held important, an element of their spirit. As it was the motifs which primarily interested the brothers, tweaking or shaping the tales which were their vehicles (which after all is probably no more than any oral storyteller would do) presumably did not in their eyes distort their value.

(James Lloyd, Cat and Mouse, 1967, watercolour on board; Tate Gallery but not on display; I particularly like the expression in the cat’s eyes, which does not bode well for the mouse)

But back to ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’. The brazen lies of the cat are actually very funny. When the mouse doubts that anyone has ever really been christened ‘Halfgone’, the cat retaliates with my favourite remark in the whole story (added by Wilhelm, I assume): ‘You sit there at home in your dark-grey dressing-gown and long pigtail [...] and you get odd ideas. That’s what happens when you don’t go out in the daytime.’ Such a brilliant characterisation in one sentence! The final moral, ‘that’s the way of the world’, though – what exactly does that mean? That we should beware people like the cat, or that we should accept our lot in life as cat or mouse if that’s what we are? The mouse’s mistake is not that she dutifully does the housework and abides by her word, it is to fail to accept that she is a mouse. She believes that she can be the cat’s equal. Is the way of the world that we can never be equals? Or that we lack the self-knowledge to understand that we are mice?

And then there seem to be other questions... The pot of lard is hidden at the altar and consumed there by the cat who then devours the mouse in the same spot, where holy communion is received. The names the cat gives her godchildren – Skinoff, Halfgone, Allgone – these are the states through which the pot of lard passes but also the poor mouse at the end. Pot of lard and mouse are doubly conflated; the host implicitly linked. Is this a joke or something more significant? Will the mouse be rewarded in heaven? (I like to think so!) And then it seems that the cat has sinister intentions from the start: she instigates the joint ménage and fibs ‘and spun [the mouse] a tale of the love and friendship she bore her’ as if she is planning to eat her at some point anyway. Yet she gives the mouse a chance to save herself and it is the mouse who pronounces her own doom. Would the cat have spared her if she hadn’t uttered ‘Allgone’? Or did she know that the mouse would be impelled to speak; did she know the mouse better than the mouse knew herself?

Next week: ‘Our Lady’s Child’.

(‘Cat and Mouse’, alas, uncredited. I found this photograph on the internet quite by chance; I used to have a print of it stuck on my wall when I was a teenager. It still makes me laugh like a drain)