Hungarian Folktales and Pancakes

Yesterday I had to return Folktales of Hungary to the library.  I had used up all my renewals; I had to finish up my research and give the book back.  We had skipped a concert on Tuesday so I could finish up my notes.  Yesterday, I focused on stories classified under such headings as Local Legends, Animal stories, stories about Hussars, and Lying.  I finished around five o’clock, skimming the final few sections of Linda Degh’s collection.  Then my wife and I drove to the library, and dropped the book off on our way to dinner.

It had been awhile since we enjoyed Denny's pancakes, so we opted for their All You Can Eat special.  As the waiters presented us with perfectly cooked buttermilk pancakes, my wife told me about her day, and I told her a little of what I had learned about the history and culture of Hungary.  I would never have thought to study the country, had I not enjoyed Steven Brust’s novels so much.  Now I have a better understanding of his beloved protagonist Vlad Taltos, as well as the Hungarian fairy tale he included in The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.

So carried away were we with our conversation that it took us awhile to realize that we had eaten more than our normal serving.  Sure, pancakes aren’t particularly high in calories, and we had worked out this morning.  Yes, we had watched our intake today, knowing we’d be visiting Denny’s tonight, and we were using sugar-free syrup.  Still, a feeling of heaviness overtook me after as I ate.  My body seemed to be bloating, even though pancakes don’t usually give me gas.  And my head and back began to ache, as I hunched over my plate.  So I stood up to stretch, and the table flew up, scattering our plates to the floor.  I heard a loud cracking sound, and suddenly I was staring out at the stars overlooking San Diego Bay.

When my wife rose, she too broke through the roof.  We didn’t want to risk lowering our necks through the shattered wood, so we crawled out the broken roof, and dropped the money for our meals to the waiter who stared up at us.  Then we headed for the parking lot, but we had grown so tall, that each step carried us several blocks.  By the time we stopped our momentum, we stood in San Diego Bay, and we noticed waves crashing through the normally calm waters, and several boats overturned and sinking.  We saw the lights and heard the sirens of the harbor police, and so we took off through the water, keeping along the shore and ahead of the boats. 

Perhaps we shouldn’t have run after eating so many pancakes, but we felt suffused with energy.  Growing wet from sweat, water, and spray, we ran through the darkness, evading the boats, helicopters, and planes that regularly pursued us.  When my wife signaled she was getting tired, we climbed ashore.  Those dining and partying on the beach didn’t look at us strangely, so we realized that we must have burned off all the extra calories and resumed our former size.  We decided to round off the evening with dessert in a beachfront restaurant.  From other diners’ conversations, and the address printed on the back of the menu, we learned we were in Puerto Vallarta.  So we took a taxi to the airport, and caught a late-night flight back home.

The next time we visit Denny’s, we’ll plan our dinner with a little more forethought.  We really need to enjoy their All You Can Eat Pancakes on a Friday evening, so we can spend the entire weekend in such an exotic locale.  Isn’t it amazing how travel can expand the mind, and yet shrink the body?

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries
The Power of Pancakes
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

Andras Albert, Hungarian Storyteller

In a first-season episode of “Castle,” Martha tells her son Richard, the bestselling mystery writer, “Research doesn’t pay the bills.”  She’s certainly correct, as publishers pay Fiction writers not for their research, but based upon sales figures.  Nor do readers care how much research a writer does.  Their sole concern is how entertaining they find his or her novels.  Yet writers need inspiration, and the stories they write need grounding.  So research, in one form or another, seems like an intrinsic part of the writing process, as necessary to the writer as it is for anyone who is paid based upon his knowledge as well as his skills. 

Nevertheless, I’ve often wondered if I have researched too much, and written too little.  Certainly it’s easy to lose oneself in research.  Occasionally research has only underlined all that I didn’t know about a given subject, and intimidated me into not writing. I’ve often wondered how much of the research I’ve conducted was absolutely necessary, and if it contributed to what I wrote in a meaningful way.  Or was research merely pandering to my insecurities?

In her notes on the story “Handsome Andras,” contained in her book Folktales of Hungary, Linda Degh describes the storyteller, Andras Albert, as “one of the most genuinely creative storytellers in Hungarian oral literature.”  She attributes this to the land in which he worked as a lumberjack, but she also mentions that his superior abilities arise from his unique mindset.  Unlike most of his contemporaries, he describes his life as a folktale, populated by supernatural beings, characters from his own tales, and the heroic journeys he undertook.  He described, in exacting detail, an airplane he built.  Unfortunately, it crashed in the forest, and he never found time to build another.  Still, he spent part of his life in a cabin by a lake, where a dragon lived along its shores.  

Life, they say, is full of compensations.

Linda Degh describes his story, “Handsome Andras,” as an example of “the gifted storyteller who can build a complete story around an incomplete episode.  The main topic turns on the hero’s wanderings.  Well-known tale elements are skillfully interwoven to thicken the plot before the final entanglement.  Thus a new story evolves.”  This story offers numerous episodes and fantastic elements, and utilizes motifs common to classic Hungarian folk literature.  “The long wandering of the hero is described with such dramatic sense that never for a moment does it become uninteresting.  The plot is cleverly intricate; a dazzlingly picturesque world unfolds itself before us, and in a fascinating manner the changing moods, the worries and anxieties of the hero are poignantly described.”

At first glance, Degh seems to suggest that research is unnecessary, that great stories arise solely from one’s ability to harness the imagination.  But a careful look at her notes underlines that Albert “remodels the old form in so ingenious a manner that instead of turning the tale into an individual literary composition, he abides by the accepted pattern of folk narrative.”  

Despite his extraordinary imagination, it appears that Andras Albert would not have met the expectations of his audience, had he not memorized the classic Hungarian folk tales, and understood why his listeners loved them so much.  So I guess I'll return to my research, even if the rewards of doing so are not immediately apparent.  At least I can occasionally glance out my window, and watch the dragon lounging in my backyard.

This weekend, maybe I'll get started on that airplane.

Dragon Dave

The Race to Collect Hungarian Folktales

If we’re honest, I think most of us would admit we sometimes find reading the forewords and introductions to nonfiction books a tremendous bore.  Yet we know that these textual additions are intended to enhance our appreciation for the author’s efforts.  So we slog our way through them, and hope they don’t extinguish our interest in the subsequent material. 

I won’t claim that the forty-plus pages of introductory material in Folktales of Hungary held me as rapt as a Fairy Tale novel by Patricia C. Wrede or Steven Brust, but it did impress on me the dedication of the scholars who collected and studied this art form.  Linda Degh’s purpose in assembling this volume of simple tales was not to amuse children, but to provide a representative sampling of the types of stories that had proven popular with the country’s peasantry.  Researchers viewed folktale collection as important, and regarded their study as a reborn science.  With their country emerging from a long period of Austrian and then German rule, and the peasantry finally throwing off the shackles of “feudalistic and ecclesiastical tyrannies,” the researchers wished not only to enhance their understanding of their past and present culture, but to forge a beneficial link between modern scientific theory and the practical tasks of building a more equitable society for future generations. 

As my knowledge of modern Hungary is slight (to nonexistent), and this book was published nearly fifty years ago, I have no idea if Linda Degh and her associates succeeded in influencing the evolution of their society.  Nor can I share with you how their folktale tradition has flourished since then.  What the introductory material impressed upon me is how the researchers raced against time to collect these stories.  Except in the more secluded regions, or among those of exceptional storytelling talents, the ability of oral storytellers to capture and hold an audience’s attention was dying out.  Soon, they feared, there would be no more folktales to collect.

Following World War II, modernization and Soviet rule brought sweeping changes to Hungary.  Advances in communication, better access to electricity, radio and TV, libraries, cinemas, and even traveling theaters, were competing for common people’s attention.  Poverty became less of a barrier to advancement as access to education increased for all age groups and social classes.  With the introduction of modern farming methods, not only were people moving to the larger cities in large numbers, but those farmers who remained behind organized into collectives.  Researchers thus headed to remote villages, and the manor houses that were being converted into homes “for the ailing and aged” to collect these stories before those who told them passed away.

We tend to think of literacy as good thing, and of course it is.  But in the mid-sixties, it was that very growing literacy that was killing off the oral folktale tradition.  Why gather with others in a common room, when you could relax at the end of a long, tiring day in the comfort and privacy of your own quarters?  Why listen to another tell a story of his or her choosing, when you could read a book better suited to your own interests and tastes?  While a reader might miss the rise and fall of the storyteller’s voice, and any actions that accompanied his utterances, written stories tend to be better constructed than oral ones, and are unrestricted by traditional conventions.  While the reader identifies folktales with the past, he identifies new stories and novels with the present.  The latter hold an immediacy and excitement that the former lack.  So the publishing industry flourishes, and old traditions die.

Thus, researchers hurried to collect these priceless gems that held the keys to unlock both past and future.  Then they raced back behind the fortified walls of their universities.  There, carrying guttering torches, they headed for priest holes and disguised libraries in which to safeguard their treasure against the ravages of time, unethical collectors, and rampaging hordes of invaders.

All right, I’ll admit that my prose is growing too flowery, and that my summary makes the introductory material seem more exciting than it really is.  But that merely underlines the importance of my blogging, and my superior ability to convey important information.  Had Linda Degh contacted me to write the introduction, and my services been available back then, I surely could have done a better job of it!  (Right?)

Modern folktale researchers, hire me while you can.

Dragon Dave 

Intrigued by Fairy Tales

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

Related Dragon Cache entries

The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars

The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars

So often, I get through reading a novel, and I’m not sure what to say about it.  I know that it took me on a journey, but how to condense that journey into a blog entry (or a series of entries) that will resonate with the reader eludes me.  I cannot claim superior wisdom upon having finished The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars by Steven Brust, but the novel resonated with me so powerfully that I feel I must share some of what I experienced with you, before those initial impressions fade away.

In the story, we experience life from the point of view of Greg, a struggling painter who values artistic accomplishment over fame and financial success.  This is not to say that he does not want the latter, only that, with each of his paintings, he attempts to capture a human moment, a person in transition, and draw the viewer into the subject’s world.  Up to this point, he has sold one painting, and with the proceeds of the sale, he purchased a six-by-nine foot stretched canvas.  For a year it has rested against a wall while he summoned the courage to tackle it.  But now, for no particular reason, he feels ready to tackle this canvas he calls The Monster.  So he and his friend pull it out, stack it on two easels, and he begins to paint.

Greg approaches each project differently, and for The Monster, he has no preconceived notion of the important human moment he wants to capture.  Thus, he draws upon his past, while incorporating his present circumstances into every stroke of the brush.  By utilizing such an unfettered approach, he knows he must always keep in mind basics like structure, form, and perspective.  But these constraints also guide him, as he strives to impart substance upon the empty canvas. 

As with any Steven Brust novel, there’s more going on than seems immediately apparent.  Each chapter adheres to a six-part structure, and each part represents a separate storytelling strand with its own nature and purpose.  One part seems to home in on Greg’s past: all the important incidents that led him to become an artist.  Others represent his interactions with the other members of his studio, what he views as important in art, and what he tries to capture with each project.  Through these we learn of the differing approaches that his fellow artists employ on their art projects, and each method is as unique as the storyteller.  I say storyteller because Greg approaches each painting in a similar manner to an author, and also because one of the six parts is a Hungarian fairy tale about three brothers who contract with a king to hang the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky in return for half the kingdom, and the hand of the princess in marriage.  While each of the six strands inform each other and form a complete narrative, I also think it would be interesting to reread the novel, this time concentrating on only one strand at a time.

I don’t know how this novel would speak to the average reader, but as an aspiring author, I found it fulfilling because it addressed so many of my own feelings, dilemmas, insecurities, and aspirations.  While reviews for the novel are generally positive, some readers have complained that the novel is lacking in plot.  To a certain extent they have a point.  While Greg is painting, he doesn’t stumble across a corpse and have to solve a murder.  He’s not pressed into service by a secret government agency to catch terrorists trading in forgeries of old masters to fund their schemes of hatred and violence.  Nor does he learn that his parents were wizards, and get whisked off to a magical university.  This is a very different kind of novel, one for anyone who has ever tried to channel all their passion for life into something as formless as a piece of paper or canvas, and in the process hoped to make a positive impact on others.  It’s a novel for those who paint, write, draw, make music, film, sculpt, photograph, cross-stitch, quilt, or pursue any other art or craft (No matter how highly or lowly critics assess that particular medium) with the intention of making the recipients of their work think, feel, or see the world a little more completely as a result of their efforts.  This isn’t a novel for realists, skeptics, or pessimists, but one for optimists, and those who dream about transforming their world. 

I’m glad I met Greg.  I know I’m not alone, that I’ve never been alone, but having traveled on this journey with him, I feel less alone.  I only wish I did not identify with Greg so completely.  For now I'm not only determined to continue writing, but I also want to seek out and read more Hungarian fairy tales, and oh, if only I could paint like Greg!

Dragon Dave