Poem: Christening

a rough draft 

From about half a year ago.  Strike-through and red text are edits.  Gentle constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated!

Hush now, sleep.
Don't dream straw that burns
into gold, that diabolical
transformation. Death's bitter taste Bitter death
coated the back of my throat.
I couldn't fathom the scent
of skin-and-milk,
the heat of sweat-stained cheeks
in fitful sleep, after our intimate
ten-month
acquaintance.
                    Oh, God! 

                                   I would have traded
even you
to usurp nature’s sovereignty. 

Forgive me. 

I thought I wanted to hold magic
in my hands. I didn’t know
true magic dozes
out of reach and hums
itself the old stories, tracing
illuminated letters, growing toes
and fingers.  

                         You curl
your fist near your temple;
lashes skitter. Hush
little baby, I will scale
towers without doors, sift
lentils from soot and cinder,
wear out three pairs of iron shoes, cross
the briar-tangled border into wilderness
to and lay down my power;
ransom back the blood-token;
find the name
                         that will set you free.

Elenore Abbott

Mercy Killing

I have a two-year-old.  We were watching the Baby First television channel together this morning at my parents and, not for the first time, we saw Baby First Tales, a series in which "9 classic fairy tales are retold and reinterpreted just for little ones."

This morning, it was Hansel and Gretel.  Here's Rumpelstiltskin.

I don't have any feeling either way with the series's sanitizing fairy tales to make them "appropriate" for the youngest of "readers."  We've been doing that for centuries now, ever since fairy tales started to appear in print.  It's the decision of a discerning parent if he or she wants to expose little ones to the sometimes scary realities of fairy tales--because in truth, that's what fairy tales do.  Expose us to realities (good and bad, the depraved and the beautiful) that we aren't mature enough to understand, or may never really understand.

But these stories have so very little in common with the eerie and sublime fairy tales from which they take their names.  Why bother calling them retellings at all?  Why not make the final jump and change the name of the characters?  It's not like a candy-made house or a difficult to pronounce name, in and of themselves, are an intrinsic part of fairy tales.

And that's just it.  I'm not offended that my beloved fairy tales have been altered beyond recognition.  I just don't consider them fairy tales.

As for my son, I continue to read fairy tales to him, in children's books that loyally translate the Grimm's versions into easy-to-digest prose, with pictures.  Straight from my collection of Hans Christian Anderson.  And from my own memory.

Obata Takeshi
(Do click on the picture to enlarge it; it's extraordinary.--C)

It is important to me that he is told fairy tales.  Not a neat lesson wrapped up in a fairy tale package, but the real, true, uneasy experience.  I'm not going to shelter him in this sense, and I don't think I need to.

The uneasiness seems to come to older children or adults who have not been read Grimms, Perrault, or Anderson, when they first hear about them.  Or to adults who sit down to analyze their favorite childhood fairy tales for the first time.

Young children who are exposed to fairy tales for the sake of hearing fairy tales, on the other hand, handle them pretty well.  Witch cannibal in an oven?  Natural.  Queen forced to dance in hot iron shoes?  What else would you do with a sociopath stepmother?  Let her plead insanity and sentence outpatient services?

Chesteron, as usual, sums up my entire feeling on this in one phrase:  "Children are innocent and love justice.  Adults are wicked and prefer mercy."

Well-Spun Tale: A Book Review

Spinners, by Donna Jo Napoli and Richard Tchen

Disappointment splatters like mud on a new cloak.  The spinner is about to ask how wool yarn could possibly interest him, when the sun catches the strand that Elke holds out to him.  It sparkles off the white and goes thick and warm on the black.  The spinner takes the skein with respectful hands.  "Black and white together," he says, admiration making his voice rich.

"I knew you'd be impressed."  Elke interweaves her fingers.  "I knew it."  (Spinners 85)


I picked up Dona Jo Napoli's The Magic Circle because it had an illustration by Leo and Diane Dillon on the cover.  I read it because it was a re-telling of Hansel and Gretel.  I read Napoli and Richard Tchen's Spinners because I read The Magic Circle and because I love Rumpelstiltskin.

I was immediately sold by Ms. Napoli's lyrical prose in The Magic Circle.  Her present-tense writing is arresting, and counter-intuitive to a fairy tale.  But the sense of a fairy tale remains intact, in the distance despite a historical grounding (she keeps them German, near if not exactly in the 18th century).  She is vague enough about the details that one feels this may indeed have happened once upon a time, or any time.

Spinners didn't disappoint.  Like in The Magic Circle, we are permitted the villain's point-of-view, and he is altogether sympathetic (if not outright heroic as the witch is in TMC).  Tchen and Napoli's answers to the gripping questions that make this fairy tale so impactful, and my favorite, are original but organic.

The title character Rumpelstiltskin is referred to as "the spinner" throughout the story, making us conspirators and witnesses of the mystery of his name.  The cause of his littleness--he is actually lame in this telling--and his fierce, insidious desire for the queen's firstborn, is expertly woven.

This is an extremely human story, despite its element of fantasy.  Like in E. Nesbit's books, Spinners has really only one magical quality--transformation of straw into gold--and the rest of the narrative unfolds in relation to it.  While the straw-into-gold magic is essential to the plot, this isn't a story about magic.  It is a story about hubris, relationships, identity, and perseverance.

There are many moments of possible redemption that present themselves to the spinner; and each time, he turns away from them, whether from shame, impossibility to see worth in himself or others, or inability to forgive.

The miller's daughter, Saskia, is fleshed out as a character.  No longer the voiceless victim, she becomes admirable in her perseverance, and her emotional dilemma is presented in such a way that it is immediate and utterly believable.

A powerful tale that has given me fodder and affirmation for my own re-telling, and no less the fairy tale for its lack of a ribbon-tied happy ending, I highly recommend Spinners.  




P.S.  Unfortunately, I can't count this easy and enjoyable read toward my Fairy Tales Retold reading challenge goals because I read it before the new year!

The 1st Chapter

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Puzzles in and about Rumpelstiltskin

In his chapter on "Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity" in Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, Professor Zipes writes

Rumpelstiltskin is a disturbing fairy tale, not because we never really know the identity of the tiny mysterious creature who spins so miraculously, even when he is named by the queen, the former miller's daughter. 

This is a puzzling statement.  I frequent blogs and fairy tale forums enough to know that the funny little man, his outlandish ability, and his absurd request for a necklace, then a ring, and last a child, are what intrigue readers and make the fairy tale stand out among its literary brethren.  The fact that the tale ends with so many unanswered questions* is the premise of Vivian Vande Velde's delightful collection of stories, The Rumpelstiltskin Problem.

He writes further

It is disturbing because the focus of folklorists, psychoanalysts, and literary critics has centered on Rumpelstiltskin's name and his role in the tale despite the fact that the name is meaningless.

This also puzzles me, though I will try to avoid the amateurish desire to brood on the fact that only scholars and academics' opinions should determine why a fairy tale is memorable or important.  In fairness, Professor Zipes is probably directing his book to an audience of folklorists, psychoanalysts, and literary critics, of which (I assume) you and I are not one.

I am more puzzled by the fact that the absence of meaning behind Rumpelstiltskin and his name is cause for his dismissal.  

In any good tale or movie, the presence of an antagonist or conflict is crucial for its existence.  Without a conflict, there would be no story.

The fact that Rumpelstiltskin's motivation, his nature, and the meaning behind his name is never revealed does not diminish the very real problem put to the miller's daughter.  It could be said Rumpelstiltskin is disturbing because these unknowns are never disclosed, and not because we waste time wondering about the nondisclosure.  

I believe the unknowns present a very real challenge to hearers and readers; that of knowing the nature of their sufferingss and difficulties.  Of helplessness in the face of hardships.  The inability to name a fear, to shed light on it, and with knowledge, to banish it into darkness.

Zipes says the mannikin's name 

reveals nothing about Rumpelstiltskin's essence or identity.  The naming simply banishes the threatening creature from interfering with the queen's life.  Moreover, his role has always been presented in a misleading way.  According to the Aarne-Thompson tale type 500, Rumpelstiltskin is categorized as a helper, though he is obviously a blackmailer and oppressor.  (emphasis mine) 

Yet naming one's enemy** is an ancient tradition that gives a person power over the one who has been named.  Finally, I am puzzled as to why, if it is so obvious that Rumpelstiltskin is a blackmailer and oppressor, gifted storytellers have successfully depicted him as a sympathetic antagonist, or even anti-hero?

"In short," the paragraph concludes, "the categorization has strangely resulted in concern for a villain whose name is just as meaningless as the scholarship that has been absorbed in naming him."

The lack of knowledge about the identity and motivations of Rumpelstiltskin can be very significant to those who have ever faced an obstacle they did not know how to overcome.  And, as is the way with myth and fairy tales--and poetry--it is in the not-telling, the leaving-blank, the things-left-unsaid that their meanings and power take shape and form, that the tales become the subject of discussion, that folklorists, psychoanalysts, and literary critics are still pondering their significance today.

*  Even what are called "answers" by a fairy tale standard, which can sometimes be more obtuse than revealing.  As in Bluebeard: we know the other wives died because they opened the door--but what did the first one do to deserve death?

**  Or even one's ally.  I am by no means a Jewish scholar, but I understand that in their tradition, knowing the name of the Hebrew God is a sacred privilege.