YOU GUYS!

I'm speechless here, and mostly just being all flail-ly and squeaking.

This is what Russian fairy tales feel like!
Russian fairy tales, illustrated awesomely.

See?  This is awesome.  Go to Yana Moskaluk's page!  Tell her to do more fairy tales!  Give her moneys!  I WANT A PRINT!  I WANT ALL THE PRINTS!

Ahem.  I may be in need of more sleep.

:)

Story Time!

           Sit down, reader, and I'll tell you a story...

            Fairy tales come from an oral tradition—these stories have been told and re-told in different languages and by different people, all putting their own words onto older stories.  So, here is one of my favorites of Grimm’s tales, in my own words—A warning; it is ridiculous.  It makes very little sense.  It is a dumb story.  I really, really love it for no good reason.

The Boy Who Could Not Shudder

            Once upon a time, there lived a small family with only one son, who was considered a little bit dense—and he was, make no mistake about that.  He was also very unhappy, for he had always heard people tell of how this story made them shudder, or how the dark made them shudder, and he had never felt that way which upset him because it sounded like fun, I guess.  He just could not shudder or feel fear.  He whined about it so much to his parents that they eventually told him to go out into the world and learn to shudder so that he would finally shut up about it.

            So he did.  He has many terrifying adventures that he is unfazed by—he sleeps under a hangman’s tree full of dead people, and crawling with demons and then when the dead start to moan and curse him he…asks them to shut up so he can sleep.  When he is captured by bandits, he whines to them about not being able to fear, they decide to try to frighten him by showing off the heads of those they have killed.  He just sighs and tells them it’s no use, tries to leave, and has to fight them all.  Which he does.  I suppose that if you are going to be a whiny moron it is good to be able to fight well.

            He ends up all alone in a tavern full of dead people, bemoaning his sad fate of not being able to fear anything when the last person left alive tells him that there is a nearby castle, haunted by Hell itself.  If he can last a whole night there, the castle will be freed and, it’s said, the hero will marry the princess and become a king.  I suspect the bandit just wanted to get on with dying in peace.

            Well, the idiot basically says “oh fiiine.  At least if I can’t shudder I’ll be doing something useful.”  So he goes to the castle and prepares to spend the night.  The original story spends a great deal of time on the gruesome and fearful events of that night, demons eating the flesh of humans (“no thanks, I’ve got some bread of my own,” says our fearless nincompoop), and playing “ninepins” with human skulls and femurs.  Our hapless hero is very good at ninepins and has a grand old time gambling with demons and winning and never feeling any fear at all, and being grumpy about that fact.  Well, dawn comes, he hasn’t run off or become mad—so the curse is broken and he marries the princess.

            You’d think he would be satisfied, but…no. He spends the first year of his marriage to the princess complaining about how he still never learned to shudder.  One day, after she got fed up with it, she dumps a bucket of cold water on him.

            He exclaims, “Oh! That’s so cold I’m shuddering!”  (Seriously. He really says that.)  And he realizes that he can shudder.

            And then he lives happily ever after.

            Hahahaha.  Seriously, I can make the case that a lot of fairy tales originally had a purpose, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that one was there for.  There is a pretty good rendition of that one in the Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. 

BTW:  If you have not seen this series DO EEEET.   I mean, you really can't go wrong.  Greek myths! Fairy tales! Muppets!  If you have Netflix, it is available streaming online.  I'll do a full review at some point, but until then, check it out!

Welcome to my world!

     Once upon a time, a young girl who loved books a little too much discovered a forgotten shelf in the back of her middle school library with oversized, strange books that each had a color in the title.  The Big (pick-a-color) Book of Fairy Tales.  She liked the color Green, so she picked up the Big Green Book of Fairy Tales and went home with it.  There were some familiar stories, to be sure, but there were many more that weren’t. When she was finished, she read the Red book, and the Fuchsia book and the Blue book, until she had read all of the books on that shelf. Fairy tales, before the big green book, were stories that ended happily, and were mostly animated bits of fluff and music.  Now, they included non-endings, dark, frightening woods, and terrible revenges—and she started to notice patterns in the stories that echoed through to her beloved modern books.

            She could not help but notice that the tales in those books, while never actually repeated, were often retellings and adaptations of each other across cultural boundaries. She started thinking about the whys of these tales, why these stories were able to adapt to new cultures and travel around picking up bits and pieces as they went.  She began to ponder the why of the fairy tale archetypal characters, and look for them in the rest of her media consumption.  She noticed that the characters that populate fairy tales are characters that are pretty dang universal across the world, from Africa to England, Asia to North and South America. 

            The Fool, the Crone, the Priest/Shaman/Monk, the Princess, the Prince/Warrior, and the Absent Mother.

*** ***

            Good story, yes?  It may not be as obvious as I would make it in a fairy tale of my own, so here’s the deal.  I’m that girl.  And I love fairy tales. I love their absurdity, the matter-of-fact way they dump strange people and places on the reader and just assume the reader will go along with it.  I love the way modern movies and stories all use the same archetypes, even when they don’t mean to.   I love the way these stories are adaptable and fluid and move from culture to culture, era to era.  I love that these stories have probably been around as long as we’ve had people telling stories—and as far as I can tell, that means we’ve been telling them as long as we’ve been people.  I even love the bizarre and arbitrary way we separate Myth from Fairy Tale and Fable.  I love that I can find a story that we Americans would call a “Cinderella” story in just about every country.  I love the fact that Cap ‘O Rushes became King Lear, which then became Ran, a samurai movie by Kurasawa. 

            I love fairy tales because they speak to me about Story as a concept, rather than a thing.  Fairy tales tend to be simplified stories—all plot, no character development, no explanation.  They become, in this way, our archetypal stories, and we tell them a million different ways.

            I seek out these modern retellings, authors who play with the characters and clichés and conventions.  I love Disney movies, I am fascinated at the way they needed to trim and lighten fairy tales for modern audiences and how those re-tellings have completely altered the way most folk think about those old tales. 

            This blog then, is a place for me to explore my thoughts on fairytales and story and flail about excitedly (and hopefully coherently) so that my wife doesn’t have to listen to me ramble at her as much about what makes Baba Yaga SO FUCKING COOL.  I’ll tell you stories about what fairytales mean to me, and I’ll tell you the old tales that you may or may not have heard. 

I will probably swear, and I won’t shy away from the gruesome aspects of fairytales—I may, in fact, actually focus on them from time to time—I think it is interesting the way these tales have been sanitized and cleaned up for modern consumption.  So, consider this your fair warning—this blog is probably not for kids or people who get extremely concerned about bad language.

            Have fun, stick around, keep a bowl of popcorn ready, and settle in!  Story time!