ONCE UPON A TIME
NEW FAIRY TALES
PAULA GURAN
For Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling—
without whom so many wonderful new fairy tales for both children and adults would never have been written.
Copyright © 2013 by Paula Guran.
Cover art by Golda Reyes.
Cover design by Sherin Nicole.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
Cover title set in QumpellkaNo12 typeface by Gluk Fonts.
All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.
“The Giant In Repose” © 2013 Nathan Ballingrud.
“Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me” © 2013 Christopher Barzak.
“Tales That Fairies Tell” © 2013 Richard Bowes.
“Warrior Dreams” © 2013 Cinda Williams Chima.
“Blanchefleur” © 2013 Theodora Goss.
“The Road of Needles” © 2013 Caitlín R. Kiernan.
“Below the Sun Beneath” by Tanith Lee.
“The Coin of Heart’s Desire” © 2013 Yoon Ha Lee.
“Sleeping Beauty of Elista” © 2013 Ekaterina Sedia.
“Egg” © 2013 Priya Sharma.
“Lupine” © 2013 Nisi Shawl.
“Castle of Masks” by Cory Skerry: this version © 2013 Cory Skerry.
(An earlier version appeared in Fairy Tales in Split Vision, ed. Cindy Lynn Speer, Drollerie Press, 2009).
“Flight” © 2013 Angela Slatter.
“The Lenten Rose” © 2013 Genevieve Valentine.
“The Hush of Feathers, the Clamour of Wings” © 2013 A. C. Wise.
“Born and Bread” © 2013 Kaaron Warren.
“The Mirror Tells All” © 2013 Erzebet YellowBoy.
“The Spinning Wheel’s Tale” © 2013 Jane Yolen.
ISBN: 978-1-60701-420-1 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-404-1 (trade paperback)
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CONTENTS
Ever After • Paula Guran
The Coin of Heart’s Desire • Yoon Ha Lee
The Lenten Rose • Genevieve Valentine
The Spinning Wheel’s Tale • Jane Yolen
Below the Sun Beneath • Tanith Lee
Warrior Dreams • Cinda Williams Chima
Born and Bread • Kaaron Warren
Tales That Fairies Tell • Richard Bowes
Sleeping Beauty of Elista • Ekaterina Sedia
The Road of Needles • Caitlín R. Kiernan
Lupine • Nisi Shawl
Flight • Angela Slatter
Egg • Priya Sharma
Castle of Masks • Cory Skerry
The Giant in Repose • Nathan Ballingrud
The Hush of Feathers, the Clamour of Wings • A. C. Wise
Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me • Christopher Barzak
The Mirror Tells All • Erzebet YellowBoy
Blanchefleur • Theodora Goss
About the Editor
Ever After
Where did it start for you? When did you first discover fairy tales?
For me, it was a book titled Fifty Famous Fairy Stories: no author or editor listed, only the illustrator, Bruno Frost. Published by the Whitman Publishing Company as part of their Famous Classics series, the copyright dates are 1946 and 1954. I think the first version was a traditional hardcover with a dust jacket. My edition is printed on cheap pulp paper—286 pages total—and its “hardcover” is printed in vivid color with a shiny cellophane-like coating over cardboard. Frost’s line drawings are enhanced with spot color of either aqua or pink. I still have it: spine replaced with packing tape and pages crumbling.
I have no idea where the book came from or when, but I know my mother read its stories to me before I could read myself. Then I later read them myself, over and over. The tales are, of course, sanitized versions, but decently written in straightforward, never condescending prose. The selections are a hodgepodge—probably heavily influenced by Andrew Lang’s fairy tale books of various colors—of English and Scandinavian folktales, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Madame d’Aulnoy, Arabic literature, and maybe other sources.
I don’t care to analyze the origins of the contents or even ponder why these fifty were selected—this is a holy book to me. It was both magical and very real—it took me away from “real life” but it also was pertinent to my life in many ways—and it was even revelatory.
Far from turning me into the sort of girl who expected some prince to save her, fairy tales were examples of people, animals, even beasts becoming who and what they really were. Bad things happened to all kinds of people, but if you were clever and showed others your value, you’d triumph in the end.
I also remember being deeply outraged at foolishness. As much as I loved the story “Rapunzel,” for instance, I thought the mother—who so desired rampion she endangered her husband and lost her child—to be idiotic. Rapunzel herself was a complete lamebrain for thoughtlessly exclaiming, “Good mother, how is it you are so much heavier to draw up than the King’s son? He takes but a moment to climb up to me.”
In my teens, I discovered that wasn’t the question the girl posed when the tale was first retold by the Grimms. Rapunzel’s query was: “Why it is that my clothes are all too tight? They no longer fit me.” After living nightly with the prince “in joy and pleasure for a long time,” Rapunzel was pregnant. If you lock a girl up in a tower and don’t tell her anything about birth control, pregnancy is a natural consequence of “joy and pleasure.” What a relief! She wasn’t stupid, just ignorant.
Nor did I see the prince as a rapist or a victimizer. He was so devoted to Rapunzel he threw himself off the tower when he thought he had lost her forever. And Rapunzel turned out to be damned resourceful; after giving birth to twins and living through great misery, she healed the prince’s blindness and saved the man she loved . . . and possibly a whole kingdom. The way I saw it, they’d lived through hard times in the unsafe, brutal world outside isolating towers and unprotected by royal entitlement. Rulers with such experience would be a good bet to reign well and serve their people.
I also eventually learned my Fifty Famous/Andrew Lang/Brothers Grimm version of “Rapunzel” was not the only traditional story about a maiden locked in a tower. There are similar tales to be found in many cultures. The Grimms weren’t even correct in calling it a folk tale. Their source may or may not have known it was a retelling of a story published by Friedrich Schultz in 1790, who had—in turn—translated it from “Persinette,” a 1698 French story by Charlotte-Rose de La Force. “Persinette” was evidently inspired by Giambattista Basile’s “Petrosinella,” published in 1634 in the first volume of his Lo cunto de li cunti.
I came to view the vegetable-craving mother-to-be in a different light too. The cravings of a pregnant woman can indicate dangerous vitamin deficiencies, and in many folk traditions fulfilling an expectant mother’s desires for certain foods is of tantamount importance. Perhaps it did amount to a matter of having to have the rampion or dying.
The witch? Maybe she was a wise woman or herbalist who had knowledge that could save both mother and child. Demanding custody of the child in return seems an extremely unequal deal, but it may have been in the infant’s best interests if the mother was weak or ill.
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p; Or perhaps the father was thinking only of saving his own skin or his wife’s life. He might have doubted the chances the child would even be born.
As for shutting a child reaching puberty away from the world—many parents wish they could do that very thing. Some even attempt to do so—sometimes with similar outcomes as far as pregnancy.
I have many more—often conflicting—ideas about the meaning of the story now. And I'm not a scholar or expert in folklore and fairy tales—I'm sure they have even more to say.
But, at the very least, the story said something about how we all have to grow up and break out of whatever towers we are imprisoned in. We all wander lost and blind at times; we all hope for a happy ending or, at least, that our suffering will be worth its cost.
That is part of the wonder of fairy tales: they are simple, intimate stories that are, at the same time, complex and broadly applicable. We experience them and understand them one way as children, other interpretations arise as we become adults, still more thoughts as we mature further. As children we feel the darkness in the woods and fear what lurks in its shadows. As adults we begin to understand that there is no light without the dark; that without the dangers of life, the risks, the difficulties, the hardships, and the monsters, we cannot grow. If we never go into the woods, we’ll never really understand the “ever after” of our lives.
The old stories were intended for adults or an “all ages” audience that included children. They began as folk tales told aloud; later they were literary works authored by individuals (although often inspired by or based on the older oral traditions). Eventually shaped into what was considered a more suitable form for children, adults then disdained them as nursery stories.
Then in the late twentieth century, while still existing in versions intended for the youngsters, fairy tales re-emerged in literary retellings as stories for adults, .
“Rapunzel,” my randomly chosen example, has directly inspired contemporary authors such as Anne Bishop, Emma Donoghue, Esther Friesner, Gregory Frost, Louise Hawes, Tanith Lee (twice), Elizabeth Lynn, Robin McKinley, Lois Metzger, Richard Parks, Lisa Russ Spaar, and others. There are several beautiful picture book versions in print, and it has been expanded into novels for children with books like Golden by Cameron Dokey (2006), The Stone Cage by Nicholas Stuart Gray (1963), and Letters from Rapunzel by Sara Holmes (2007). Zel by Donna Jo Napoli (1996) and The Tower Room by Adèle Geras (1992) are novels intended for young adults; for adults there is Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth (2012).
“Rapunzel” has been adapted into graphic novels and for dance, stage (including incorporation into a Broadway musical), television, video, had its eponymous protagonist turned into a Barbie doll, and—with Tangled (2010)—animated by Disney and consequently into inestimable Disney Princess merchandise.
And that’s just one fairy tale, not even a story considered among the very best known, most popular, or most beloved.
Fairy tales evolve. This mutability is one of the many reasons fairy tales have endured and continue to both reflect and effect culture.
In the last few years, the idea of fairy tales being more than “kid’s stuff” has found a broader audience. What had been (re)established among scholars and in genre and mainstream literature for decades has, through television and film, now truly reached the masses. Although far from the first fairy-tale-based television series, Grimm debuted on NBC in fall 2011. The premise: dangerous fairy-tale creatures exist in the “real” world; only a cop descended from a line of “guardians,” the “Grimms,” can defeat the monsters. ABC introduced series Once Upon a Time in October 2011. In it, fairy-tale characters have been brought into “our” world by a curse. A spin-off, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland will hit small screens fall 2013. The CW premiered Beauty and the Beast on October 11, 2012—loosely based on the Ron Koslow-created 1987-1990 CBS series—which was, of course, an updating of the fairy tale.
In 2012 there were two Hollywood versions of Snow White’s story: Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. This year, 2013, has already seen releases of Jack the Giant Slayer, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters—none of which were spectacular successes. Will that stem the cinematic tide? Probably not. You can still expect Frozen, a Disney-animated film of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” to open late in 2013. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as the villainess from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is due out 2014, as is a live-action Cinderella directed by Kenneth Branagh. Also scheduled for 2014: a film version of Steven Sondheim’s fairy tale mash-up musical Into the Woods. In March 2013, the Boston Globe estimated the number of fairy-tale slated to be released between 2012 and 2014 at twenty.
Unless intended specifically for children, these twenty-first century revampings often go back to the darker roots of the stories. Heroines are seldom passive victims and inequality in general is often battled along with other evils; some are extremely violent and overtly sexual.
There are probably more theories of why fairy tales are enjoying their current resurgence as there are fairy tales resurging: it’s merely a public-domain path for the entertainment industry to capitalize on the post-Harry Potter boom in fantasy; fairy tales offer an escape from our economic doldrums and unsettled times; they aren’t an escape at all, but horrific confrontations; most movies are reworkings of fairy-tale tropes anyway, so this is really nothing new; pop culture has a tendency to infantilize (as with superheroes), this is another way to do it; fairy tales provide both heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses and provide a focus on a female, but with plenty of room for violence and SFX that appeals to the male demographic; they are iconic, we have a built-in nostalgia for them, and familiarity breeds easy marketability; when Disney played with and cleverly twisted its own concept with Enchanted, it made Hollywood reconsider the trope (and, yes, there are rumors of an Enchanted 2) . . .
Who knows what makes a trend? After all, for the last four decades or so there have been myriad academic theories, explanations, and not always civil debate about fairy tales themselves.
Nowadays fairy tales are assiduously studied, interpreted according to differing philosophies, mined for inner meaning, psychoanalyzed through various filters, and hotly debated. Fairy tales can be seen in many—often antithetical—ways. There are those who consider them morally deficient, others as means to enforce traditional morality. They are seen as sexist or feminist; timeless or products of a specific time and event; nationalistic or universal; hegemonic or subversive; eternally relevant and totally irrelevant; metaphoric or allegorical; considered as art or dismissed as tawdry entertainment; too scary and violent or a safe way to deal with primal fears; they appeal to us because they give us hope or they validate what is real . . . ad infinitum.
This anthology, however, has no agenda other than to present new fairy tales written by some talented authors. I gave the writers no definitions or boundaries. I simply stated that traditional stories often started with the phrase used as the title—“once upon a time”—but fairy tales have always resonated with the reader’s own time and place. They have power and meaning for today and tomorrow. Contributions could be new interpretations of the old or an original story inspired by earlier fairy tales.
I also invited each author to say something about the writing of their story and/or what fairy tales meant to them. I think you’ll find the comments introducing each story far more illuminating than what I have provided here.
For the last few months, I’ve been keeping this treasury of wonder, if not locked up in a tower, at least all to myself. Now it is time to allow you to experience these wonderful new fairy stories and their marvelously varied ever afters.
Paula Guran
June 2013
Online Sources for Fairy Tales Old and New
Cabinet des Fées (www.cabinetdesfees.com) celebrates fairy tales in all of their manifestations: in print, in film, in academia, and on the web. Also hosts two fiction zines.
Endicott Studi
o (endicottstudio.typepad.com) is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the creation and support of mythic art. Their Journal of Mythic Arts appeared online from 1997 to 2008. Site includes essays, stories, and musings on folklore, modern magical fiction, and related topics.
SurLaLune Fairy Tales (www.surlalunefairytales.com) features forty-nine annotated fairy tales, including their histories, similar tales across cultures, modern interpretations and over 1,500 illustrations..
Fairy Tale Review (digitalcommons.wayne.edu/fairytalereview) is an annual literary journal dedicated to publishing new fairy-tale fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The journal seeks to expand the conversation about fairy tales among practitioners, scholars, and general readers.
This story was originally written in exchange for a donation to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. I was broke then, but I could write, and I found someone who was interested in having a story written to a prompt of their choosing. At the time I’d never been to Louisiana, so I instead wrote about a watery setting. I grew up with Korean folktales of the Dragon King Under the Sea, which I remember more from the illustrations in the children’s books than the stories themselves, and I have often thought that they are the closest thing that Korean lore has to Faerie.
Incidentally, the treasures in this story owe something in spirit to a certain fantastic table owned by my grandmother, which my cousins and sister and I would often marvel over: a hollowed out bowl of wood with a glass top, within which were souvenirs gathered from the many places my grandparents traveled to when they were younger.
Yoon Ha Lee
The Coin of Heart’s Desire
Yoon Ha Lee
In an empire at the wide sea’s boundaries, where the clouds were the color of alabaster and mother-of-pearl, and the winds bore the smells of salt and faraway fruits, the young and old of every caste gathered for their empress’s funeral. In life she had gone by the name Beryl-Beneath-the-Storm. Now that she was dead, the court historians were already calling her Weave-the-Storm, for she had been a fearsome naval commander.
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