Both charms and fairytales use powerful numbers: three pigs, wishes or tasks; sing the charm nine times; ‘The Six Swans’; ‘The Twelve Wild Ducks’; and so on.
The herbs and weeds of the charms also figure in fairytales. Rampion or rapunzel condemns a girl to life in a tower; parsley in the Italian version dooms Petrosinella. Nettles must be spun into garments if the sister in ‘The Wild Swans’ wishes to turn her brothers back into young men. Roses figure in ‘Rose Red’ and ‘Sweetheart Roland’; hazels in ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Ashputtel’; not to mention fruit and vegetables such as apples, turnips and beanstalks.
Some old plant names carry clues to their earliest uses, and understanding those uses adds meaning to fairytales. For example, hazel, sacred to Thor amongst others, was used to cure the bite of an adder, and was the wood of choice if you wanted a divining rod to find hidden treasure. Not surprising then that Ashputtel goes for help to the hazel tree that she watered with her tears to say, ‘Shake shake hazel tree, gold and silver over me.’ The hazel obliges, thus doing away with the need for a fairy godmother. If we only had the key to unlock all these secret meanings.
Fairytales are both extraordinary, and ordinary, rooted in the everyday; never far from either the hedgerow or the kitchen garden. They happen to everyman and everywoman, everywhere at everytime. The cast includes millers, poor peasants, frogs and donkeys as often as kings, queens and princesses, and only luck separates the king from the peasant: both are susceptible to magic spells; both must obey the deep, hidden rules of life. If these characters are named at all, their names are often descriptive: Little Red-Cap or One Eye rather than Rosalind or Robert. The setting is often a cottage, whether of gingerbread, straw or bricks; a tower; or a wood or forest, where danger lurks but also transformation and new possibilities. Kindness, loyalty, even simplicity are set against pride, greed, and envy.
As I sensed, fairytales, like myths, legends and folktales, carry some of the oldest and deepest insights into the dramas of everyday life: birth, coming of age, sex, motherhood, fatherhood, jealousy, greed, goodness and evil. Psychoanalysts from Freud and Jung onwards have found rich pickings there – the Oedipus complex, Narcissism, the Electra complex – but the insights spring from countless common people, the nameless storytellers who passed on these tales. Perhaps something akin to the wisdom of crowds was at work over the centuries, or a Wikipedia-like process that filtered out any details that did not resonate and passed on only those that did, subtly shaping the stories until they carried profound meanings beneath their apparently simple exteriors.
Fairytales can be many things, but they are almost never sad. Sadness grows out of incompleteness, a sense of ‘if only’, a yearning for resolution, and in fairytales there is a remorseless sense of completeness, of everything being in its proper place. Hans Christian Andersen’s sometimes maudlin retellings and inventions are the only exception, often infused with his own sentimentality and beliefs. His stories can be freighted with morality, whereas fairytales are rarely moral or just in any sense we would recognise. Nevertheless they satisfy something deep within us; they tell us about life.
Traditional fairytales are told plainly, without unnecessary detail. They were part of a rich oral tradition for centuries before they were written down, and any repetition no doubt served as a mnemonic for the teller: ‘What big eyes you have . . .’, ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff . . .’, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall . . .’ But an oral tradition is difficult for us – children of the book and the internet – to imagine or really understand. We no longer have to remember much at all, except our passwords. Oral traditions still exist, though, as I discovered when I met an Englishman whose mother was a McNab, like me. I mentioned a story I’d heard in childhood that involves a stolen Christmas feast and some burly McNab boys sent to the neighbouring loch by their father to fetch it: ‘Tonight’s the night if the lads are the lads.’ Led by Smooth John, a name that would not be out of place in any fairytale, they carry their own boat overland to reach the island of the Neishes.
It is a bloody tale, and the McNab lads not only bring home the remains of the Christmas feast but the heads of the clan who stole it, leaving behind their boat on the top of a hill because they couldn’t carry everything. ‘Here are some bowls [balls] for the bairns to play with,’ the Englishman chimed in at the appropriate point in the story. I was astonished. He knew the story, and the pivotal phrases within it, though we had learned it on opposite sides of the globe.
Long unbroken chains of story like this must have stretched back in time to prehistory. Neolithic peoples must have been telling each other creation stories, law stories, stories that explained themselves and their world to their children and each other. One of the questions that intrigues me is just how old fairytales might be and what lost clues they might contain about our ancestors.
One place to look is in the language of these stories. I like browsing through etymological dictionaries; they’re like an archaeological dig through the history of words and meanings. Sometimes you can climb down to ancient Indo-European roots, then follow their derivatives up through synonyms and words with no obvious connections, imagining the branching ideas and metaphors that once connected them, and the changes in thinking that brought about changes in meaning. To take three examples, fairytales often contain witches and spindles. Fairy comes from Old French faerie (land or place of fairies, enchantment or magic) from fae, or fats (plural), meaning the Fates, from the Proto-Indo-European root bha – to speak. The Fates appear in Norse and Germanic mythology, both of which inform Anglo-Saxon culture; they are usually women; and you don’t have to look far before you find them associated with thread. One of the Fates spins the thread of life, the second measures it, and the third cuts it. In Anglo-Saxon, fate is wyrd, which gives us weird, as in Macbeth’s three weird sisters, the witches. Wyrd is linked to words meaning to turn or come about, in other words to spin. Goddesses used a spindle to spin the thread of fate, and the words for spindle come from the same root.
It’s only a small hop to one of the old words for witch. Hag, originally haegtesse, was used by Anglo-Saxons to translate goddess, and the three Fates, but also for a mortal prophet- ess or witch. The coming of Christianity erased much of the knowledge of these pagan beings and their powers, and blackened their reputations; victors write history, and old religions always get a bad press. Hag is also connected to haw, meaning hedge, which links it to hawthorn. Like hazel, it was a sacred tree associated with holy wells, and safeguarded against witchcraft. Hawthorn was linked to the Tuatha dé Danaan of Irish mythology. One of them, Mac Cuill, was named after his god Coll, the hazel. By the time of Oisín, the Tuatha dé Danaan had become the fairy folk, and solitary hawthorns were believed to mark faerie territory. Haegtesse means hedge-rider, which not only brings flying witches to mind, but loops back to the hedgerows, sacred trees, herbs and plant lore for which these women were renowned. It’s possible to keep leap-frogging from one word or concept to the next, in an unsystematic and unscholarly way, slowly building up a sense of the network of secrets and meanings hidden in these old tales, remnants of an earlier time.
I was in the midst of this meandering hunt when I thought to check on the sound shifts in words such as pater/father or pedem/foot, word pairs that derive from single roots. To my surprise and delight, I found that the law I needed was Grimm’s law. Jacob Grimm not only collected fairytales, but studied corresponding consonants in Indo-European, Low Saxon and High Germanic languages. He was equally fascinated by the origin of his native language and German folklore and fairytales. (In German, fairytales are called wonder tales, and almost always contain magic.)
Grimm said, ‘My principle has always been in these investigations to undervalue nothing, but to utilise the small for the illustration of the great . . .’ This sounds like an excellent way to approach fairytales. Often under- valued as simple stories for children, they are distilled from the insights and preoccupations of numberless ordinary and not-so-ordi
nary people. They are the concentrate of much of our culture’s wisdom and insights about life, and receptive readers sense this and are unsettled by it. Artists, writers and poets know they have struck a rich vein.
In The Wilful Eye, the six fairytales are familiar: ‘The Tinderbox’ (Andersen); ‘Rumplestiltskin’ (Grimms); ‘The Snow Queen’ (Andersen); ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (French); ‘Babes in the Wood’ (English ballad); and ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ (Andersen). In The Wicked Wood, some of the stories are more unusual: ‘The Wolf and the Seven Kids’ (Grimms); ‘Otesánek’ or ‘Little Shaveling’ (Bohemian); ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Andersen); ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Ashputtel’ (Grimms); ‘The Fairy’s Midwife’ (English); and the Irish Tír na n’Óg, which edges from fairytale into myth. Here you will find stories as bewitching and powerful as any fairytale, monsters with benign human faces, heroines gutsy enough for any era, and people like us, who find themselves suddenly entangled in magic, or confronted by the terrible, bewitching world of Faerie.
The forest has always been a place of danger, mystery and transformation. Lose yourself in The Wicked Wood and you may discover new and magical secrets.
{A Tourist in Normal}
If you’re Amish, you’re given the world
outside as your eighteenth birthday present –
here you go, fall in love with a stranger at a bar,
go to parties, drop e,
you with your quaint rustic accent
and last decade’s clothes.
A tourist in Normal.
The grandmother sends the mermaids up at fifteen –
Look, my mermaids:
there’s land, there’s the Love Boat
watch the couples dancing.
Dancing!
How would your tongue
mouth a pillow of passionfruit sponge
after years of salty sushi?
How could you cosy up to a sailor
you with your sequin scales and fish-breath?
But here, they say, here’s choice.
No wonder they flick disdainful tails
flipping back under faster than whitebait.
One to five – basked on a sandbank, star-gazed.
Knew that the sky belled around them
that air smelled green and that sailors
hungered – but for what?
One to five didn’t know.
The youngest mermaid was hollowed out by hunger already.
In her sea garden she’d sharpened her desire –
the beautiful marble boy she swam loops around
the boy who, in her rocking dreams,
tiptoed to the clamshell bed, bent over
his eyes full of nothing but her and then
his mouth, fluttering
like delicate fins, then firm
and then – oh she was starved and her yearning
sang her own heart siren songs.
There’s always one. One colt-boy or gawky girl
looking at life through the keyhole of a different world
who says, yes, yes.
We grow old, hunch-backed, rheumy-eyed
but we said it once.
Yes. Yes. Paid whatever it took
to squirm us through from one world
to whatever it was we saw –
love, fame or magic.
Look at me now wearing my boa
of seasnakes, my fat toad familiar
squat on my shoulder.
Yes, I said, yes.
{My Childish Days}
I played in the garden
where the marble boy
was king to my queen.
One by one my sisters went up
for their days in the sun.
They came back. Yes, there were lights
and people, birds flew, so?
I was as patient as the moon.
I knew what I’d find –
a sky wide as the ocean
filled with flying and –
passionately real, no longer stone
but warm skin and heartbeat,
the king to my queen.
{Witch of the Love Boat}
Mostly they plop to the surface
like baby seals, wet behind the ears,
get bored and go back home.
It’s not what they thought it would be,
land ahoy but out of reach,
the passengers on the Love Boat
standing awkwardly on their two legs.
Give up sequined flip of that sparky tail?
They cover their yawns with a dainty hand.
Not number six.
Surfs up on a wave and spies
the Lurve Boat and who on it
but him, languidly leaning on the rail
watching for whales or mermaids
or staring vacantly out to sea.
(I’d guess the latter.)
She loved his eyes, brown as earth
the waves of hair the wind lifted
his dinner shirt strained just so
across his biceps.
He’d caught her in his net
and he wasn’t even fishing.
There’s always a catch –
he’s married, she’s emo
the internet dating site crashes
just as he hits her profile.
You think you have trouble?
Imagine a tail. How to tuck it under
the wedding dress. How to waltz?
Then think of it slipping between silk
sheets, the scales catching.
No joy there.
Enter me, Witch of the Love Boat.
{The First Chorus}
We saw her longing and knew her lost.
Oh little sister, would you leave us for a man?
What has he, that we can’t offer?
Come, let us braid your hair,
let us sing together,
swaying like soft weed to the songs
that loop and flow, ribbons of seduction,
velvet handcuffs that lock
each of us fast to the other.
Why would you leave us,
little lost note
in our loving harmony?
We reach for you
but you evade our pale fingers
as though they were sticky tentacles.
{The Storm}
Who questions the storms and rips of Fate?
Destiny pulls the carpet from under
our questing feet – or tails –
and suddenly we’re shoved off course
or back on if you’re an optimist.
So there she is, my sixth little one,
all hair and silver,
all ache and emptiness,
but with a heart full as an old sea boot.
She’d watched him watch the horizon.
She’d watched him dance with the lucky ones,
his cheek – a little manly stubble – to cheek
with powdered softness, she’d seen his hand
tighten around a waist, bunching up the satin.
A squall of darkness on that particular horizon,
a rough swell, monstrous under the surface,
thrashing upwards under the ship,
a whipping foam frenzy, the fairy lights
extinguished, then lightning and crack, crack,
the captain hears the great bow sunder.
Life boats – but it’s too late. The girls go down
shrouded in party frocks. Some call out
feebly and bob about like tossed seabirds,
some cling to broken planks or each other
but soon the ocean closes over all,
sailors and revellers alike.
The sixth one, the littlest, dives deep.
She’s looking for one man only,
leaves the rest – takeaway for night foragers –
strikes for the shore in her best bronze medallion
rescue stroke. She’s got him,
her pale arm looped around his neck.
But will he ever be so docile, so needy
so much hers
again?
{The Rescue}
As soon as I saw him dancing on the deck
I knew it in every silver bone
that he was mine.
I cursed my spangled tail,
flapping around on the sand
like a dying fish.
When the storm came I was pleased.
I heard the mast snap, the great ship groan.
I saw the people flounder and sink.
All the girls he’d danced with,
their pretty dresses wrapped around their useless legs.
I found him, mouth and fingers blue
his chill skin white as marble.
I swam him right through the night.
Let him live, let him live,
I begged the moon and stars
but they shone for themselves
not for me, not for him.
When I reached land, I hauled him in,
always my tail tripping me up –
how I hated it! I breathed into his mouth.
I lay over his body until I felt it grow warm.
Then I slid back to the sea,
leaving a slick of salt on his skin,
a hint of silvered scale, the smell of me
on his breath.
Enough for a man in love
to find his heart’s joy, his heart’s own.
Other men have done it with just an old shoe.
He woke to her touch. Some beach babe,
cheap sunblock and attitude.
He reeled with love.
Not for me.
Never for me.
I took my shamed heart home.
My arms ached
from tugging him towards life.
My mouth stung
from the chill I’d kissed warm.
But still I was tossed up
and abandoned by his heart’s tides –
not even remembered.
{The Prince Speaks}
Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 18
