One of the childhood reading experiences that stuck with me
was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As I worked my
way through stories collected in that old hardcover volume, I remember being
mystified by characters performing bizarre actions, such as sawing the heads
off children, and then sewing them back on.
Of course, the children return to life.
Well, even I knew back then that such actions didn’t represent
reality. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure
what the stories were intended to convey.
I just knew they were weird.
In the past few years, publishers have rolled out a
seemingly endless succession of volumes relating in some way to classic fairy
tales, which are a subset of a given culture’s folktale tradition. Scholars study old volumes and manuscripts,
and then herald what they believe to be the oldest, truest, and most original
form of particular stories, accompanied by their exhaustive notes and
commentaries. Popular authors contribute
to collections of new Fairy Tales that celebrate this storytelling
tradition, or discuss the merits of the old favorites at Science Fiction conventions. Through them, we learn that the
original stories are darker and stranger than anything published today. Picking up on this trend, Hollywood has produced
an explosion of big screen adaptations lately, including three featuring Snow White. Fairy Tales have also invaded the small screen, with shows like “Grimm” and “Once
Upon A Time” that scramble up characters or elements from these old stories and
intermix them with those drawn from modern life.
Ever since that first childhood reading, I’ve regarded Fairy
Tales as unfinished business. I’ve
intended to return to them at some point, to study their structure, the common
elements such stories share, and their historical and cultural contexts, in the
hope of understanding not only what I read as a child, but a tradition that
seems to be part of the foundation upon which modern storytelling is
built. Early last year, I read a novel
based on “Snow White and Rose Red,” a German story collected by the Grimm
brothers. (This is a different story
from the “Snow White” that Disney later transformed into the movie “Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs.”) As with all oral
storytelling, the fairy tale evolved with time.
In its shorter, original form, it was called “The Ungrateful Dwarf,” and
contained fewer elements than the version later collected by the Grimms. In her novel, Snow White and Rose Red,
Patricia C. Wrede expands the classic story.
She changes the setting to Medieval England, and paints a convincing
world in which the lives of magical beings intermix with that of our heroines,
Snow White and her less-known sister.
I found the novel a refreshing change from my normal fantasy
fare, and I particularly liked how Wrede intermixed the classic tale with her version. At the beginning of each chapter, an
italicized paragraph serves as an introduction.
After awhile, I came to realize that these paragraphs were actually
segments of the classic fairy tale, and each chapter her elaboration of the paragraph. Thus I could see how a modern writer might
update older story elements and structures, and expand them to
novel length. Through reading the novel,
I learned that it was part of a series commissioned by Terri Windling in the
1980s, and one of my favorite authors, Steven Brust, had also contributed a
novel. So of course, I had to check out
Steven Brust’s Fairy Tale!
In The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars, Steven Brust pursues a
different strategy. Instead of
elaborating on a classic story, he gives us an entirely modern one, and weaves
into it portions of a Hungarian Fairy Tale called "Csucskari," which is named
after the story’s protagonist. After
reading his novel twice, I contacted Brust, and he recommended that I track
down Folktales Of Hungary by Linda Degh if I was interested in reading the
original story, as well as learning more about the Hungarian Folktale
tradition. So that’s what I did, but
more on that tomorrow.
Isn’t it interesting how one good story can lead to another,
even if the readings are separated by years or decades?
Dragon Dave
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