Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

by Marina Warner

  Figure 2 The fairies dance their ringlets to the whistling wind. William Blake, Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, c.1786.

  BOX 1 Meeting the Fairy Queen

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  In the mid-thirteenth century, a poet called Thomas of Erceldoune fell asleep on a bank on a steep hillside when a lady appeared to him: she was so beautiful he mistook her for the Virgin Mary, even though she was riding a horse caparisoned with silver bells and saddled with gold and ivory, and carrying a bow and arrows with three bloodhounds following and three greyhounds leashed. When he starts paying due homage to her magnificence, she rebuffs him; but he presses his suit. She warns that if she takes him with her, he’ll have to become her slave—and at this point she turns into a hideous, palsied, leprous hag. But it is too late; he has surrendered himself into her hands. They start descending through the gathering gloom, past a roaring ocean and across rivers of blood; once through these horrors, they reach a smiling orchard where four paths meet. There, the Fairy Queen—for it is she of course—reveals herself in all her beauty and radiance and irresistibility, and tells Thomas where the paths lead: Heaven, Purgatory, Hell, and, the last, to Elfland. There, Thomas will stay with her, after she has laid him under a spell of silence for seven years.

  At the end of this time, the Fairy Queen releases him. He believes he has only been gone seven days, and she sets him back on his way home with a great gift: once cursed with muteness, he’ll now always speak true. He becomes ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, the first English-language poet in the literature, a writer who combines the roles of fantastic storyteller and seer. And of course one of the stories he tells is about his sojourn in the other world, one of the many underworlds that lie on the other side of reality.

  When John Keats wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ his head was filled with memories of such adventures in his poetic forerunners’ lives.

  I met a lady in the meads,

  Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

  Her hair was long, her foot was light,

  And her eyes were wild.

  . . . . . . . .

  She found me roots of relish sweet,

  And honey wild, and manna-dew,

  And sure in language strange she said—

  ‘I love thee true’.

  She took me to her elfin grot,

  And there she wept and sighed full sore,

  And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

  The Victorians surpassed the enthusiasm of the Romantics in their pursuit of faerie lore, with Sir Walter Scott in Scotland brilliantly mining the stories he found from every source, oral and written, either at home in the Highlands or farther afield. Scott was a cultural patriot but also a synthesizer and omnivore on a Shakespearean scale. It was Scott who first brought Kirk’s work on fairies to public notice, and in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), he passes on the marvellous legend of Thomas the Rhymer, who was snatched into a fairy hill by a Fairy Queen. This tale stages a classic encounter with the seductions of fairyland.

  Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets. The seventeenth-century poet Richard Corbet warns in ‘Farewell, Rewards and Fairies’: ‘A tell-tale in their company | They never could endure!’ Robert Kirk himself was stolen into a fairy hill one moonlit night, Walter Scott also reports, and was never seen again, punished for giving away secrets of the fairy commonwealth.

  As Christina Rossetti dramatizes thrillingly in ‘Goblin Market’ (1862), her long, strange, narrative poem, creatures from fairyland may appear and capture you with their queer irresistible gifts:

  ‘We must not look at goblin men,

  We must not buy their fruits … ’

  Her goblins are closer to Shakespeare’s ambiguous fairies, Moth, Mustardseed, and Peaseblossom, than to that ‘airy spirit’ Ariel, and they’re also given Bosch-like features, monstrous and metamorphic, furry and whiskered:

  Curious Laura chose to linger

  Wondering at each merchant man.

  One had a cat’s face,

  One whisked a tail,

  One tramped at a rat’s pace,

  One crawled like a snail,

  . . . . . . .

  She heard a voice like voice of doves

  Cooing all together:

  They sounded kind and full of loves

  In the pleasant weather.

  Laura gives a lock of her golden hair in exchange for the fruits the goblins are proffering; her sister Lizzie then has to place herself in grave danger, and wrestle with the ‘queer little goblin men’, in order to bring Laura back from the dead. In many ways, the sisters double each other. The scholar of Victorian literature, Isobel Armstrong, has commented, ‘this is the most dazzling of the era’s fairy creations … riddle-like poems of desire, exclusion and painful lack—poems structured through subtle negative particles and subjunctives which disclose haunting hypothetical worlds.’ The state of sexual enthrallment that Rossetti conjures (Laura ‘Sucking … sucked until her lips were sore … ’) transmutes into keyed-up fairy imagery and hypnotic lullaby the poet’s experience of young women’s ordeals, for Rossetti herself worked with unmarried mothers in Highgate penitentiary near her house and, like her friend Lewis Carroll, campaigned against the exploitation of children.

  The poem is a characteristic story of faerie, an original invention inspired by folklore about fairy abductions. It is a brilliant, perturbing, invented fairy tale in verse which springs from principles laid down in the folkloric tradition about a possible other world nearby.

  Christina Rossetti was also one of the Victorian writers who identified children as a special readership for fairy tale and related material, and in Sing Song (1879–93) she adopted the patter of nursery rhymes in charm-like verses:

  ‘Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!’

  Crows the cock before the morn;

  ‘Kikirikee! kikirikee!’

  Roses in the east are born.

  ‘Kookoorookoo! kookoorookoo!’

  Early birds begin their singing;

  ‘Kikirikee! kikirikee!’

  The day, the day, the day is springing.

  Folklore, Patriots, and Localism

  Although fairies were already beginning to decline into sentimental whimsy, they were still powerful beings in the imagination of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who wrote to regain the lost time of Celtic faerie, and, alongside his friends Speranza Wilde (Oscar’s mother) and his closest ally and associate Augusta, Lady Gregory, became the catalyst of the Celtic twilight’s resurrection of Irish folk tales. They collected them to uncover ‘the singularity of the nation’. Regarding the wee folk, Yeats made common cause with the Scots and the Irish against the English, declaring that ‘the world is … more full of significance to the Irish peasant than to the English. The fairy populace of hill and lake and woodland have helped to keep it so.’ For Yeats, fairyland ensured poetry. He quotes a Gaelic proverb as an example of the vitality of mind and language that he prized, which he connected implicitly to faery lore: ‘The lake is not burdened by its swan, the steed by its bridle, or a man by the soul that is in him.’

  What did Scott, Rossetti, Keats, or Coleridge really think about the fairies they evoke in word and image? Few would argue that they believed in them, but they attributed belief to others. This form of surrogacy, which transposes belief on to another, occurs frequently in the history of fantasy, and many writers at different times have engaged passionately by proxy in the fairy world. Most of the accounts of encounters in fairyland report incidents and adventures that occurred to someone else. This is the terrain of anecdote, ghost sightings, and old wives’ tales, of oral tradition, hearsay, superstition, and shaggy dog stories: once upon a time and far away among another people …

  The greatest writers about other worlds—from Shakespeare to Rossetti to Yeats—summon up Queen Mab and Robin
Goodfellow and Puck in all their peculiar detail, and they woo their audiences to surrender to ‘antique fables and fairy toys’. But they bend the material through dream frames that distance it from immediate testimony. Like medieval kings who kept a ragged and filthy hermit at court to pray on their behalf, we—sceptical, worldly dwellers in culture’s mindscapes—need proxies to prevent the deforestation and depopulating of fancy’s traditional territory. J. M. Barrie dramatized this manoeuvre of belief-by-proxy in Peter Pan, in the famous scene when the fairy Tinkerbell drinks poison and Peter turns to the audience and tells us to clap our hands to save her. In the book of the play, published later, Barrie wrote,

  The fairies are nearly all dead now … where the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy … Children know such a lot now. Soon they don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

  This emotional blackmail—with its shameless pulling of the heartstrings—remains fractured by the irony that however loud we clap to show our faith, Barrie isn’t sincere and neither are we, and if the children with us are convinced, they’re the dupes of a need that adults feel, which children meet.

  By 1906, when Rudyard Kipling wrote Puck of Pook’s Hill in defence of the ancient lost fairy world of Britain, the fairies had been successfully prettified; he railed against ‘little buzzflies with butterfly wings and gauze petticoats and shiny stars in their hair and a wand … painty-winged wand-waving sugar-and-shake-your-head set of impostors … ’.

  The nexus of fantasy, nationalist antiquarianism, and romantic longings for an imaginary innocent past, a childhood of the tribe, continued to find in fairyland’s denizens its ideal representatives. In Britain, Tolkien’s scholarly interests led to his triumphant invention of the Shire, the other world of the Hobbits—they are rather late incomers in the census of fairyland, but they grow out of the professor’s deep knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic myth and narrative; in The Lord of the Rings, he reinvigorated and transmuted figures and creatures he had found in epic and romance and deployed them through Middle Earth. Other imaginary worlds occupy magical kingdoms under the sea, castles deep in the enchanted forest, or fairy hills; they are found at ‘The Back of the North Wind’, in Elfland, Wonderland, Neverland, Narnia, or ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, as in the title of the Norwegian fairy tale about a girl who quests far and wide through thick and thin for her lost beloved bear.

  The activities of a folklore scholar like Katharine Briggs, who compiled her fantastic Dictionary of the Fairies, and of Jorge Luis Borges, who created a wonderfully entertaining treasury, called The Book of Imaginary Beings (which includes beasts and monsters ‘imagined’ by Kafka, C. S. Lewis, et al.), spurred on, in turn, the imagination of later generations to populate these secondary worlds. Rare bogles and boggarts and grylli whom scholars had unearthed began to colonize new, popular narratives: the role-playing games of Dungeons and Dragons, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series teem with once endangered species of fairy folk. Fairyland undergoes constant re-stocking and re-invention. As the home territory of fantasy, it attracts new settlers, monsters and marvels, their species increased by widening encounters with cultures beyond Europe on the one hand, and by the expanding potential of computer-generated imagery (CGI) on the other (Gollum, a splendid concoction of Tolkien’s, was unforgettably realized by new techniques in the films of the books). These games and successful fictions are not fairy tales as such, but draw on their legacy. While ‘here be dragons’ might announce a land of marvels, the words do not ipso facto turn the story in which they appear into a fairy tale. But enchanted territories and their fantasy population are the givens of fairy stories, even when these narrative features are not explicitly present or active. The premise of a Secondary World beyond this one acts like the live culture necessary to turn milk into yoghurt, or the ‘mother’ that transforms wine into vinegar.

  The powerful underlying motives for the construction of these untrue stories include a need to move beyond the limits of reality. Once there, many consequences follow, but one of the main effects is speculative pleasure. ‘There is more bliss in describing the nymphs than in describing medals,’ declared Paracelsus. ‘There is more bliss in describing the origin of the giants than in describing court etiquettes. There is more bliss in describing Mélusine than in describing cavalry and artillery. There is more bliss in describing the mountain people underground than in describing fencing and service to ladies.’

  Or, to put it in fairytale terms, there is more magic in inaugurating a different reality, to meet the hunger of hope and desire.

  2

  With a Touch of Her Wand

  Magic & Metamorphosis

  In a true fairy tale everything must be wondrous—mysterious and unconnected—everything animated.

  Novalis

  ‘What is Real?’ asked the Rabbit one day …

  ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real?’ …

  ‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Skin Rabbit.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse …

  Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

  ‘Magic tale’ has also been suggested as a term that captures the idea of the form better than ‘fairy tale’ or even ‘wonder tale’; it points to the pivotal role that enchantment plays, both in the action of the stories and the character of its agents. Such stories assume that visible and invisible beings intercommunicate and they present this state as if it were immemorial, the default condition of the mythic imagination; the tales take place in an animist landscape, in which everything is animated—animals speak, stones move of their own accord. Enchantment, however, has its own changing history, its own tides and currents, from medieval faerie to Romantic possession and hauntedness, from sceptical magic entertainment to the contemporary technological uncanny.

  Classic fairy tales, deploying wonders and inspiring astonishment, depend on magic as causation; magic is part of the fabric of everyday reality, which is permeated with invisible forces moved by magical beings, who mostly act beyond the protagonists’ reach and spring continual surprises, behave capriciously, and create unforeseeable effects which contradict the laws of physics, logic, and probability. The gold and glass, forests and animals, all vividly and physically embodied, reach out to the listener and the reader and pull us in to the story, and there everything changes, for the laws of nature are disregarded and the plots work instead according to the laws of enchantment. Glass is used for shoes; also for mountains; in the form of a mirror, it speaks, or in the form of a distaff it shatters when its maiden owner sleeps with a roving rogue. Characters in fairy tales have magical powers—for better or worse. The world does not operate as we know it: time and space shrink and stretch. Aurora sleeps for a hundred years and wakes up young (though the palace chef, when ordered to cook her, is worried she might have become a bit tough); Tom Thumb survives a dozen misadventures against adversaries the size of volcanoes. Seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility offer protection—or, in the wrong hands, threats.

  The Magic of Nature

  Animals speak, especially birds, and no one in a fairy tale is taken aback when rocks and trees and streams and waterfalls act under their own volition or shape-shift from one form to another (see Figure 3); protagonists take it in their stride that if you drink the water of a certain stream, you will be turned into a wolf or a deer or a dragon or a snake. In order to survive, heroes and heroines rely on beasts (see Figure 10) or use their wits: sometimes by prising out the evildoers’ secrets. The dead cannot be suppressed; animate forces keep circulating regardless of individual bodies and their misadventures. Even whe
n a tree has been cut down and turned into a table or a spindle, its wood is still alive with the currents of power that charge the forest where it came from. The singing bone of the murder victim in a traditional ballad denounces his or her killers; in the story of ‘The Greek King and Doctor Douban’ from the Arabian Nights, the doctor’s severed head speaks after death, and, with thrilling inexorableness, inflicts death by poison on the tyrant who murdered him. Revenge, served cold. Aschenputtel, the Grimms’ Cinderella, in the tale written over a hundred years after Perrault’s classic ‘Cendrillon’, plants a twig on the grave of her mother, and it grows into a hazel tree; when she grieves there, and cries because she’s been forbidden to go to the ball, the tree shakes down a golden dress and golden shoes for her to wear. This happens three times. No wand, no pumpkin, or rat, or lizard, no fairies. The spirit of Cinderella’s dead mother flows through nature and sparks the tree, inspiring the birds to help her daughter, and later to peck out the eyes of her wicked stepsisters.

  Figure 3 Living nature: every tree may be friend … or foe. ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’ by the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1917.