Angela Carter’s
BOOK OF FAIRY
TALES
Angela Carter’s
BOOK OF FAIRY
TALES
Edited by Angela Carter
Illustrated by Corinna Sargood
VIRAGO
This edition first published in Great Britain in November 2005 by Virago Press
First published in two editions as:
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales Collection, Introduction and
Notes © Angela Carter 1990
Illustrations © Corinna Sargood 1990
The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales Collection © The estate of Angela Carter 1992
Illustrations © Corinna Sargood 1992
Afterword © Marina Warner 1992
Copyright © The estate of Angela Carter 2005
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 34900 821 9
Constable
is an imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
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50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales brings together two collections of fairy tales that Angela Carter edited, which were published as The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992).
About a month before she died in February 1992, Angela Carter was in the Brompton Hospital in London. The manuscript of the second collection lay on her bed. ‘I’m just finishing this off for the girls,’ she said. Her loyalty to us was boundless. When we first heard she was ill, we told her not to worry, we had published The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, that was enough. But no, Angela claimed it was just the project for an ailing writer to pursue. And so she worked on the book until a few weeks before her death. Though she had collected all the stories, and had grouped them under her chosen headings, she had not yet written an introduction and was unable to finish the notes. Shahrukh Husain, editor of The Virago Book of Witches, was able to draw on her own extensive knowledge of folklore and fairy tales to complete the notes including remarks and notes from Angela Carter’s own files wherever they were left.
For this new edition we have printed the introduction Angela Carter provided for The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Marina Warner wrote an appreciation of Angela Carter after she died. Published originally as the Introduction to the The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, it appears now as an Afterword.
Lennie Goodings
Publisher, Virago
CONTENTS
Publisher’s Note
Introduction
Sermerssuaq
1. BRAVE, BOLD AND WILFUL
The Search for Luck
Mr Fox
Kakuarshuk
The Promise
Kate Crackernuts
The Fisher-Girl and the Crab
2. CLEVER WOMEN, RESOURCEFUL GIRLS AND DESPERATE STRATAGEMS
Maol a Chliobain
The Wise Little Girl
Blubber Boy
The Girl Who Stayed in the Fork of a Tree
The Princess in the Suit of Leather
The Hare
Mossycoat
Vasilisa the Priest’s Daughter
The Pupil
The Rich Farmer’s Wife
Keep Your Secrets
The Three Measures of Salt
The Resourceful Wife
Aunt Kate’s Goomer-Dust
The Battle of the Birds
Parsley-girl
Clever Gretel
The Furburger
3. SILLIES
A Pottle o’ Brains
Young Man in the Morning
Now I Should Laugh, If I Were Not Dead
The Three Sillies
The Boy Who Had Never Seen Women
The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle
Tom Tit Tot
The Husband Who Was to Mind the House
4. GOOD GIRLS AND WHERE IT GETS THEM
East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon
The Good Girl and the Ornery Girl
The Armless Maiden
5. WITCHES
The Chinese Princess
The Cat-Witch
The Baba Yaga
Mrs Number Three
6. UNHAPPY FAMILIES
The Girl Who Banished Seven Youths
The Market of the Dead
The Woman Who Married Her Son’s Wife
The Little Red Fish and the Clog of Gold
The Wicked Stepmother
Tuglik and Her Granddaughter
The Juniper Tree
Nourie Hadig
Beauty and Pock Face
Old Age
7. MORAL TALES
Little Red Riding Hood
Feet Water
Wives Cure Boastfulness
Tongue Meat
The Woodcutter’s Wealthy Sister
Escaping Slowly
Nature’s Ways
The Two Women Who Found Freedom
How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales
8. STRONG MINDS AND LOW CUNNING
The Twelve Wild Ducks
Old Foster
Šāhīn
The Dog’s Snout People
The Old Woman Against the Stream
The Letter Trick
Rolando and Brunilde
The Greenish Bird
The Crafty Woman
9. UP TO SOMETHING – BLACK ARTS AND DIRTY TRICKS
Pretty Maid Ibronka
Enchanter and Enchantress
The Telltale Lilac Bush
Tatterhood
The Witchball
The Werefox
The Witches’ Piper
Vasilissa the Fair
The Midwife and the Frog
10. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE
Fair, Brown and Trembling
Diirawic and Her Incestuous Brother
The Mirror
The Frog Maiden
The Sleeping Prince
The Orphan
11. MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
Achol and Her Wild Mother
Tunjur, Tunjur
The Little Old Woman with Five Cows
Achol and Her Adoptive Lioness-Mother
12. MARRIED WOMEN
Story of a Bird Woman
Father and Mother Both ‘Fast’
Reason to Beat Your Wife
The Three Lovers
The Seven Leavenings
The Untrue Wife’s Song
The Woman Who Married Her Son
Duang and His Wild Wife
A Stroke of Luck
The Beans in the Quart Jar
13. USEFUL STORIES
A Fable of a Bird and Her Chicks
The Three Aunts
Tale of an Old Woman
The Height of Purple Passion
Salt, Sauce and Spice, Onion Leaves, Pepp
er and Drippings
Two Sisters and the Boa
Spreading the Fingers
Afterword by Marina Warner
Notes on Parts 1–7 by Angela Carter
Notes on Parts 8–13 by Angela Carter and Shahrukh Husain
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
lthough this is called a book of fairy tales, you will find very few actual fairies within the following pages. Talking beasts, yes; beings that are, to a greater or lesser extent, supernatural; and many sequences of events that bend, somewhat, the laws of physics. But fairies, as such, are thin on the ground, for the term ‘fairy tale’ is a figure of speech and we use it loosely, to describe the great mass of infinitely various narrative that was, once upon a time and still is, sometimes, passed on and disseminated through the world by word of mouth – stories without known originators that can be remade again and again by every person who tells them, the perennially refreshed entertainment of the poor.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most poor Europeans were illiterate or semi-literate and most Europeans were poor. As recently as 1931, 20 per cent of Italian adults could neither read nor write; in the South, as many as 40 per cent. The affluence of the West has only recently been acquired. Much of Africa, Latin America and Asia remains poorer than ever, and there are still languages that do not yet exist in any written form or, like Somali, have acquired a written form only in the immediate past. Yet Somali possesses a literature no less glorious for having existed in the memory and the mouth for the greater part of its history, and its translation into written forms will inevitably change the whole nature of that literature, because speaking is public activity and reading is private activity. For most of human history, ‘literature’, both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written – heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.
For the last two or three hundred years, fairy stories and folk tales have been recorded for their own sakes, cherished for a wide variety of reasons, from antiquarianism to ideology. Writing them down – and especially printing them – both preserves, and also inexorably changes, these stories. I’ve gathered together some stories from published sources for this book. They are part of a continuity with a past that is in many respects now alien to us, and becoming more so day by day. ‘Drive a horse and plough over the bones of the dead,’ said William Blake. When I was a girl, I thought that everything Blake said was holy, but now I am older and have seen more of life, I treat his aphorisms with the affectionate scepticism appropriate to the exhortations of a man who claimed to have seen a fairy’s funeral. The dead know something we don’t, although they keep it to themselves. As the past becomes more and more unlike the present, and as it recedes even more quickly in developing countries than it does in the advanced, industrialized ones, more and more we need to know who we were in greater and greater detail in order to be able to surmise what we might be.
The history, sociology and psychology transmitted to us by fairy tales is unofficial – they pay even less attention to national and international affairs than do the novels of Jane Austen. They are also anonymous and genderless. We may know the name and gender of the particular individual who tells a particular story, just because the collector noted the name down, but we can never know the name of the person who invented that story in the first place. Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’
The chances are, the story was put together in the form we have it, more or less, out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away, and has been tinkered with, had bits added to it, lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories, until our informant herself has tailored the story personally, to suit an audience of, say, children, or drunks at a wedding, or bawdy old ladies, or mourners at a wake – or, simply, to suit herself.
I say ‘she’, because there exists a European convention of an archetypal female storyteller, ‘Mother Goose’ in English, ‘Ma Mère l’Oie’ in French, an old woman sitting by the fireside, spinning – literally ‘spinning a yarn’ as she is pictured in one of the first self-conscious collections of European fairy tales, that assembled by Charles Perrault and published in Paris in 1697 under the title Histoires ou contes du temps passé, translated into English in 1729 as Histories or Tales of Past Times. (Even in those days there was already a sense among the educated classes that popular culture belonged to the past – even, perhaps, that it ought to belong to the past, where it posed no threat, and I am saddened to discover that I subscribe to this feeling, too; but this time, it just might be true.)
Obviously, it was Mother Goose who invented all the ‘old wives’ tales’, even if old wives of any sex can participate in this endless recycling process, when anyone can pick up a tale and make it over. Old wives’ tales – that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.
Nevertheless, it is certainly a characteristic of the fairy tale that it does not strive officiously after the willing suspension of disbelief in the manner of the nineteenth-century novel. ‘In most languages, the word “tale” is a synonym for “lie” or “falsehood”,’ according to Vladimir Propp. ‘“The tale is over; I can’t lie any more” – thus do Russian narrators conclude their stories.’
Other storytellers are less emphatic. The English gypsy who narrated ‘Mossycoat’ said he’d played the fiddle at Mossycoat’s son’s twenty-first birthday party. But this is not the creation of verisimilitude in the same way that George Eliot does it; it is a verbal flourish, a formula. Every person who tells that story probably added exactly the same little touch. At the end of ‘The Armless Maiden’ the narrator says: ‘I was there and drank mead and wine; it ran down my mustache, but did not go into my mouth.’ Very likely.
Although the content of the fairy tale may record the real lives of the anonymous poor with sometimes uncomfortable fidelity – the poverty, the hunger, the shaky family relationships, the all-pervasive cruelty and also, sometimes, the good humour, the vigour, the straightforward consolations of a warm fire and a full belly – the form of the fairy tale is not usually constructed so as to invite the audience to share a sense of lived experience. The ‘old wives’ tale’ positively parades its lack of verisimilitude. ‘There was and there was not, there was a boy,’ is one of the formulaic beginnings favoured by Armenian storytellers. The Armenian variant of the enigmatic ‘Once upon a time’ of the English and French fairy tale is both utterly precise and absolutely mysterious: ‘There was a time and no time . . .’
When we hear the formula ‘Once upon a time’, or any of its variants, we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. Mother Goose may tell lies, but she isn’t going to deceive you in that way. She is going to entertain you, to help you pass the time pleasurably, one of the most ancient and honourable functions of art. At the end of the story, the Armenian storyteller says: ‘From the sky fell three apples, one to me, one to the storyteller, and one to the person who entertained you.’ Fairy tales are dedicated to the pleasure principle, although since there is no such thing as pure pleasure, there is always more going on than meets the eye.
We say to fibbing children: ‘Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it. Often, as with the untruths of children, we are invited to admire invention for its own sake. ‘Chance is the mother of invention,’ observed Lawrence Millman i
n the Arctic, surveying a roistering narrative inventiveness. ‘Invention’, he adds, ‘is also the mother of invention.’
These stories are continually surprising:
So one woman after another straightway brought forth her child.
Soon there was a whole row of them.
Then the whole band departed, making a confused noise. When the girl saw that, she said: ‘There is no joke about it now.
There comes a red army with the umbilical cords still hanging on.’
Like that.
‘“Little lady, little lady,” said the boys, “little Alexandra, listen to the watch, tick tick tick: mother in the room all decked in gold.”’
And that.
‘The wind blew high, my heart did ache,
To see the hole the fox did make.’
And that.
This is a collection of old wives’ tales, put together with the intention of giving pleasure, and with a good deal of pleasure on my own part. These stories have only one thing in common – they all centre around a female protagonist; be she clever, or brave, or good, or silly, or cruel, or sinister, or awesomely unfortunate, she is centre stage, as large as life – sometimes, like Sermerssuaq, larger.
Considering that, numerically, women have always existed in this world in at least as great numbers as men and bear at least an equal part in the transmission of oral culture, they occupy centre stage less often than you might think. Questions of the class and gender of the collector occur here; expectations, embarrassment, the desire to please. Even so, when women tell stories they do not always feel impelled to make themselves heroines and are also perfectly capable of telling tales that are downright unsisterly in their attitudes – for example, the little story about the old lady and the indifferent young man. The conspicuously vigorous heroines Lawrence Millman discovered in the Arctic are described by men as often as they are by women and their aggression, authority and sexual assertiveness probably have societal origins rather than the desire of an Arctic Mother Goose to give assertive role models.
Susie Hoogasian-Villa noted with surprise how her women informants among the Armenian community in Detroit, Michigan, USA, told stories about themselves that ‘poke fun at women as being ridiculous and second-best’. These women originally came from resolutely patriarchal village communities and inevitably absorbed and recapitulated the values of those communities, where a new bride ‘could speak to no one except the children in the absence of the men and elder women. She could speak to her husband in privacy.’ Only the most profound social changes could alter the relations in these communities, and the stories women told could not in any way materially alter their conditions.
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