What happened to them there reminds me of the fairy tales in which the youngest son sets off down the road to make his fortune, and it is always the right road, for he meets those who offer to help him, and if he follows it far enough he meets the princess he must rescue and the troll he must rescue her from. The road is more than a road; it is his destiny. In my uncle’s history, however, destiny is not mentioned. He writes:
Mrs. Hedlund’s relatives were supposed to meet them there, but none were to be found. A Norwegian who was ready to start home with an empty wagon, offered them a ride as far as he was going, which was a little village by the name of Cold Springs. There they rented a little house by the roadside where they could watch for their relatives. They remained there more than a week, before the expected relatives arrived.…
The mansion into which they were cordially invited by their relatives was an underground cellar, the very best and only habitation in their possession. While in St. Paul, they had secured some good warm clothing and shoes, so with plenty of ammunition they were able to secure deer and other game … For lighting purposes they hollowed a large rutabaga for a lamp, filled it with skunk oil, with a strip of rag for a wick. That winter they cut logs and built a small log house.
Like all fairy tales, the story has a happy ending. Mr. Hedlund opened a gun shop and earned enough money to build a comfortable home and raise a large family. My great-uncle adds, “I was lucky enough to marry one of his fine daughters.”
This was my first introduction to Mrs. Hedlund. It would not be accurate to say I forgot her, yet I ceased to think of her after I put down my uncle’s book. And so she fell asleep in the dark cellars of my mind, taking her rutabaga lamp with her. And over the years, the storeroom that hid her filled up with myths and fairy tales, goddesses and witches and wise women. And Mrs. Hedlund, living among them, took on their light and their look, as partners in a long and happy marriage are said to resemble one another. When she turned up many years later in the fairy tale I asked my husband to read, her root cellar had become an enchanted place and she herself was as ancient as the old woman so often celebrated in nursery rhymes:
There was an old woman lived under the hill,
And if she’s not dead, she lives there still.
Only the rutabaga lamp remained unchanged, casting its light both on the cellar in my uncle’s history and the dwelling that my dreaming had made of it. Thank goodness that did not change. How could I show the imaginary house if not by the natural light of the rutabaga lamp? How can we see an imaginary world except by the light of this one?
If you could hold the rutabaga lamp to one of the oldest stories in the world, that of the human child stolen by the fairies, you would find as many tales in that plot as there are people to tell them. Among modern versions I’ve always admired Mary Lavin’s “A Likely Story.” To her, the lamp shows, first of all, the everyday world of country Ireland. It shows her the pump in the village, the gloss of a blackbird’s wing, the bread cooling on the window sill in the morning, the clatter of rain on a tin roof. The fairies who lure the boy Packy from his home are as natural as the birds, the bread, and the rain. And why should they be otherwise? As Tolkien points out, “it is man who is … supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to heaven; not even to Hell …”10
Perhaps the failure to see fairyland is a human failure, for which a good writer can atone by describing it with loving attention to detail. Of the little man in green who kidnaps the boy Packy, Lavin says that “his shoes … were so fine his muscles rippled under the leather like the muscles of a finely bred horse rippled under his skin.” While showing us the beauty of the other world, she shows us the beauty of this one. For Packy, everything rare is weighed against the commonplace and found wanting. In the fairy’s chambers under the earth, he sees gold basins and ewers and pails. The fairy tells him the advantages of gold utensils. “Nothing ever gets cracked down here; nothing ever gets broken.” Packy is unimpressed:
Not that he thought it was such a good idea to have cups made of gold. When you’d pour your tea into them, wouldn’t it get so hot it would scald the lip off you?
One day in the summer that was gone past, he and the Tubridys went fishing on the Boyne up beyond Rathnally, and they took a few grains of tea with them in case they got dry. They forgot to bring cups though, and they had to empty out their tin-cans of worms and use them for cups. But the metal rim of the can got red hot the minute the tea went into it, and they couldn’t drink a drop. Gold would be just the same?
But in fact, there were no cups at all it appeared.
“One no longer has any need for food, Packy,” said the little man, “once one has learned the secret of eternal youth!”
“You’re joking, sir!” said Packy, doubtful. At that very minute he had a powerful longing for a cut of bread and a swig of milk.11
Most of the traditional changeling stories show the fairy world through human eyes. But what if we look at the human world through the eyes of the fairies? Sylvia Town-send Warner’s novel Kingdoms of Elfin opens at the moment of kidnapping. No praise of rustic pleasures here; her fairies are more at home in the court than in the country. Though fairies are invisible to mortals, she knows that they must not be invisible to readers. Rain and oak, birch and fir, heath and hill, wind and fire—of such familiar stuff are their lives made. Enchantment begins in the commonplace:
When the baby was lifted from the cradle, he began to whimper. When he felt the rain on his face, he began to bellow. “Nothing wrong with his lungs,” said the footman to the nurse. They spread their wings, they rose in the air. They carried the baby over a birchwood, over an oakwood, over a firwood. Beyond the firwood was a heath, on the heath was a grassy green hill. “Elfhame at last,” said the nurse. They folded their wings and alighted. A door opened in the hillside and they carried the baby in. It stared at the candles and the silver tapestries, left off bellowing, and sneezed.
“It’s not taken a chill, I hope,” said the footman.
“No, no,” said the nurse. “But Elfhame strikes cold at first.” She took off the swaddling clothes, wrapped the baby in gossamer, shook pollen powder over it to abate the human smell, and carried it to Queen Tiphaine, who sat in her bower. The Queen examined the baby carefully, and said he was just what she wanted: a fine baby with a red face and large ears.
“Such a pity they grow up,” she said. She was in her seven hundred and twentieth year, so naturally she had exhausted a good many human babies.12
Once you begin to see human lives from the point of view of nonhumans, you are on your way to writing The Lord of the Rings and doing away with the human altogether. Who knows better than Tolkien the pitfalls here? “Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun,” he points out. But “to make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible … will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”13
Fairies, princesses, wizards. The writer who wants to make them his own takes none of the traditional characters and motifs for granted. Take, for example, the good fairy godmothers who bring so much happiness to the kind and virtuous. Are they happy themselves? Thackeray’s sketch of the Fairy Blackstick in The Rose and the Ring holds the conventional duties of good fairies up to the light of common sense, with amusing results:
Between the kingdoms of Paffagonia and Crim Tartary, there lived a mysterious personage, who was known in those countries as the Fairy Blackstick, from the ebony wand or crutch which she carried; on which she rode to the moon sometimes, or upon other excursions of business or pleasure, and with which she performed her wonders.
When she was young, and had been first taught the art of conjuring by the necromancer, her father, she was always practising her skill, whizzing about from one kingdom to another upon her black stick, and conferring her fairy favours upon this Prince or that. She had score
s of royal godchildren; turned numberless wicked people into beasts, birds, millstones, clocks, pumps, bootjacks, or other absurd shapes; and in a word was one of the most active and officious of the whole College of fairies.
But after two or three thousand years of this sport, I suppose Blackstick grew tired of it. Or perhaps she thought, “What good am I doing by sending this Princess to sleep for a hundred years? by fixing a black pudding on to that booby’s nose? by causing diamonds and pearls to drop from one little girl’s mouth, and vipers and toads from another’s? I begin to think I do as much harm as good by my performances. I might as well shut my incantations up, and allow things to take their natural course.” … So she locked up her books in her cupboard, declined further magical performances, and scarcely used her wand at all except as a cane to walk about with.14
And the boons that fairies bestow on those they love; are they really so desirable? Jay Williams shows the logical consequences of a reward often given to good girls: every time you speak, gold will fall from your lips:
The floor was covered with gold pieces which had piled up against the door like a drift of yellow snow. Four bright gold pieces fell from her mouth and clinked to the floor.
The girl clapped her hand to her forehead and said, “Drat!”
Another gold piece dropped from her lips. She took down a large pad that hung on the wall and began writing busily on it. Marco and Sylvia came and looked curiously over her shoulders.
“I am Roseanne. Welcome,” the girl wrote. “As you see, I have something of a problem. Some time ago, I saved the life of the good fairy Melynda. As a reward, she said to me, ‘My child, since you are poor but kind, a gold piece shall fall from your mouth with every word you speak.’ … I’m sorry about the floor. I had some friends in for a party last night, and I haven’t had a chance to sweep up yet.”15
How much can you tinker with the traditional fairy tale before it changes into something else? It’s easy to tell why a fairy tale has gone wrong, harder to tell why it has gone right. It’s easy to see why George Cruikshank failed to improve on Grimm’s fairy tales when he rewrote them twenty years after he illustrated the first English edition. Cruikshank, now a confirmed teetotaler, assures his readers that at Cinderella’s wedding “the King gave orders that all the wine, beer, and spirits in the place shall be collected together, and piled upon the top of a rocky mound in the vicinity of the palace, and made a great bonfire of on the night of the wedding …16
Dickens, who admired Cruikshank the illustrator did not admire Cruikshank the editor. “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected,” he observes. “… Whoever alters them to suit his own opinions … appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.”17 What would Dickens think of Anne Sexton’s retelling of Cinderella in Transformations, her collection of Grimm’s tales retold as poems? For those unacquainted with this book, I give two stanzas from “Cinderella”:
Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted the twig on her mother’s grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.
Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the big event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came.
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That’s the way with stepmothers.18
Has Sexton meddled with what does not belong to her? No. She grinds no axes, preaches no sermons. Let no one be deceived by her comic tone; the poems start from a deep understanding of fairy tales and a respect for the dark pools of consciousness from which they rise. Between the peasant grandmother and the poet who calls herself Dame Sexton lie Jung, Freud, and the magic of modern science.
When I took my son to see a Walt Disney movie called The Cat from Outer Space, I was struck by how much science fiction has borrowed from the fairy tale. A cat from a far planet arrives in a spaceship that looks very much like a crystal ball. The cat understands our language, and by means of thought transference, it makes its wishes known without speaking. A jeweled collar gives it the power to fly. Like the clever animals in the fairy tales, this space-age descendant of Puss-in-Boots helps the hero and confounds the villain. To the hero it gives the words he needs to run the spacecraft. Though they are a jargon of technology and mathematical formulae, they sound magic to children, who do not understand them. The power of science is ours when we understand its laws. But the power of abracadabra—what has that to do with laws and logic? To be told that abracadabra is a corruption from a Hebrew phrase that means “I bless the dead”—what power does that give you but the power of faith that the dead are alive and no mathematical formula on earth can tell us how?
Science fiction often carries the same spiritual truths that fairy tales have always carried. But science belongs to a universe of cause and effect, of laws that we could understand if only we were clever enough. Magic, on the other hand, is man’s way of confronting a mystery that is beyond human understanding. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John, 3:8). When science masquerades as magic, it may give us spiritual lies such as this one, which recently caught my eye in a toy shop. On a box that claimed to hold Snow White’s talking mirror was written the following:
Snow White’s
Talking Mirror
ages 3½ to 10
It’s a Real Mirror
But just tilt it and
MAGICALLY
Snow White’s Face
Appears
and she really
TALKS TO YOU
Snow White says
6 different phrases.
Advertised on TV.
Requires 1 C cell and 3 D cell.
Batteries not included.
If magic is only in the eye of the beholder, then to God, magic and science are indistinguishable. But to a child who touches a switch on one wall and causes a light to shine in the next room, surely electricity is magic. Out of such a maze of innocence the Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, who has written so vividly about his sojourns among ghosts, has invented a television-handed ghostess. As her name indicates, her hand is a television set that shows the narrator events in far places. The magic mirror in traditional fairy tales did no less. Of the narrator’s encounter with this ghostess, Tutuola writes:
I was hearing on this television when my mother was discussing about me with one of her friends.… So as I was enjoying these discussions the television-handed ghostess took away the hand from my face and I saw nothing again except the hand.… I told her again to let me look at them.… Immediate
ly she showed it to me my people appeared again …19
When Tutuola wrote My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he had not yet seen television. Those who do not believe in the miracles of magic will speak of the miracles of science, forgetting that the rising of the sun is a miracle until you learn to take it for granted. “Try to be one of the people,” says Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost!”20
I must confess that when choosing marvels, I prefer ghosts to fairies, terror to beauty. I believe the chipmunk in Randall Jarrell’s The Bat Poet speaks for lovers of fantasy as well as poetry when he says, “It makes me shiver. Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?” One of my favorite ghost stories, A Christmas Carol, has always seemed to me so flawlessly written that I was much surprised to learn it had its beginnings in a much less successful ghost story. To read “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” published as Chapter 24 in The Pickwick Papers, and then to read what Dickens made of the same material in A Christmas Carol is to understand how a great writer uses traditional material to shape his own vision.
Before Ebenezer Scrooge came Gabriel Grub, the sexton who keeps Christmas so badly that he is willing to dig a grave on Christmas Eve. “Who makes graves at a time when all the other men are merry?” calls the chief goblin. “We know the man with the sulky face and grim scowl, that came down the street to-night, throwing his evil looks at the children …”21 The goblins carry him to hell and show him edifying scenes from everyday life, and he hears his own life judged: “men like himself, who snarled at the mirth of cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth …”22 Gabriel Grub repents, leaves his village, and returns many years later as “a ragged, contented, rheumatic old man.”
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