The Newsletter of the
Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy Dec-Jan 2015
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Contents
Gramarye issue 6 e-book out now
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Events at the Centre, 2015
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Wonderlands PGR conference
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Into the Woods ...
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Fairy Tales on Stage
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A Year-Round Folklore Calendar
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Free Podcasts on Tolkien
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Gramarye issue 6 e-book out now GRAMARYE JOURNAL WINTER 14 COVER AW_Layout 1 15/10/2014 14:01 Page 2
We are delighted to announce that Gramarye issue 6 is now available as unlimited ebook pdfs and Kindle mobi files from our online store. Subscribers are guaranteed their printed copy.
ISBN 978-1-907852-31-2 ISSN 2050 2915
The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy
Winter 2014 Issue 6
New work by • Ruth B. Bottigheimer • Tom Shippey • Robin Furth • Steven O’Brien • Joanna Coleman • Colin Manlove • Dimitra Fimi • Jacqueline Simpson • John Patrick Pazdziora • Cristina Bacchilega • Katherine Langrish
This issue’s contents include: • ‘The Case of the Ebony Horse’ (Part 2), Ruth B. Bottigheimer • ‘The American Fantasy Tradition’, Tom Shippey • ‘The Mythology of the Dark Tower Universe’, Robin Furth • ‘Child Roland’, Steven O’Brien • ‘Magic Mirrors and Shifting Skin: An Ecocritical Reading of Cornelia Funke’s Reckless’, Joanna Coleman • ‘My Life with Fantasy Literature’, Colin Manlove • A review of Brian Attebery’s Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth, Tom Shippey • A review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur, Dimitra Fimi • A review of Nancy Marie Brown’s Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, Jacqueline Simpson 3
• A review of Jennifer Garlen and Anissa Graham’s The Wider Worlds of Jim Henson: Essays on His Work and Legacy Beyond The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, John Patrick Pazdziora • A review of Andrew Teverson’s Fairy Tale, Cristina Bacchilega • A review of John Lindow’s Trolls: An Unnatural History, Katherine Langrish The printed edition of Gramarye 6 is also available from: • Atlantis Books (London) • Byre Books (Wigtown) • Emporium Bookshop (Cromarty) • Foyles (London) • Kims (Chichester) • Nemetona (Montrose) • Practical Magick (Knaresborough) • Transreal Fiction (Edinburgh) • Treadwells (London) • Waterstone’s (Chichester) • Way Out There And Back (Littlehampton) • White Witch (Waltham Abbey) • Word Power (Edinburgh)
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Events at the Centre, 2015
Our events this year are kindly sponsored by:
For all events, e-mail h.robbins@chi.ac.uk for more information or to book your tickets.
Dr Steve O'Brien, 'British and Irish Folktales' Wednesday 21st January 2015, 5.15-6.30 p.m., Room H144 Editor of the London Magazine, Visiting Fellow of Creative Writing at Chichester, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, Steve O'Brien will be presenting his version of 'Child Rowland' from his latest work, retellings of British and Irish folktales. His poetry collections include Dark Hill Dreams and Scrying Stone. Tickets ÂŁ5/ÂŁ3 concessions, free to University staff and students. 5
Shaun Gunner, 'Tolkien and/or Jackson? Filming Tolkien's legendarium' Tuesday 24th February, 5.15-6.30 p.m., room E124 The Chairman of The Tolkien Society, Shaun Gunner, will give a visual presentation on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, discussing how the films and books compare. Gunner is also an advisor and assistant to Emil Johansson's The Lord of the Rings Project and has contributed to the journals Amon Hen, Hither Shore, and Mallorn. Tickets ÂŁ5/ÂŁ3 concessions, free to University staff and students. Kate Mosse Autumn 2015, tbc Kate Mosse is the multi-million bestselling novelist whose book Labyrinth was #1 in UK paperback for six months and was named one of the Top 25 books of the past 25 years by the bookselling chain Waterstones. Translated into thirty languages and adapted as a (Image credit: major television film on Channel 4 at The Telegraph) Easter 2013, it was followed by the equally successful Sepulchre and Citadel, and several short story collections. 6
Wonderlands: Reading/Writing/ Telling Fairy Tales and Fantasy PGR Symposium, 23 May 2015, University of Chichester
Timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this event is primarily aimed at postgraduate students and early career researchers, although other scholars and the general public will be welcome. We are delighted to announce that Professor Diane Purkiss of Oxford University, who is also a creative writer of fantasy fiction (under the pseudonym ‘Tobias Druitt’), will give the Keynote Lecture, five years after her inaugural lecture at the Sussex Centre in 2010. Other speakers may include Alice illustrator John Vernon Lord and creative writer and storyteller Steven O'Brien. The day will close with a series of performances from professional storytellers which engage with the theme of wonder lands. 7
Call for Papers We are seeking papers which explore all aspects of reading, writing, and telling fairy tales and fantasy. In particular, we invite discussion of wonder lands in fantastical literature, classic and modern fairy tales, and contemporary oral storytelling. Possible topics of focus include, but are not limited to: • Other worlds, otherworldliness, Wonderland, and wonder lands • Relationships between reading, writing, and/or telling fantasy • Contemporary scholarship in children’s and adult’s fantasy literature • Storytelling as a vehicle for the fantastic • Practice and performance of fairy tales • Fantastical non-fiction • Relationships between real and imagined wonder lands • Meta-textual conversations with classic fantasy literature • Imagining the fantastical world through illustrations and picture books We also welcome paper submissions or panel presentations which include a creative or performative element. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (or panel proposals of 1,000 words) and a short personal bio to the organisers, Joanna Coleman, Joanne Blake Cave, and Rose Williamson at wonderlands.symposium@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is 31 January 2015. Registration dates will be announced on the Sussex Centre website in the near future at http://www.sussexfolktalecentre.org. 8
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Into the Woods ...
William Gray, Professor of Literary History at the University of Chichester and Director of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, on the increasing use of 'dark' fairy tales on screen. He was also recently published on this subject in the Telegraph. The release this week of the Disney film 'Into The Woods' is further evidence of the very high profile fairy tales currently enjoy, in both popular and high culture. The latter is shown by the recent publication of three magisterial books, Once Upon A Time: A short history of the fairy tale (OUP, 2014) by Marina Warner (now Dame Marina after the New Year Honours list), and Jack Zipes’s The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition and his Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms' Folk and Fairy Tales (both Princeton University Press, 2014). 10
Rowan Williams was prompted to discuss the first two of these just before Christmas in his New Statesman review entitled ‘Why we need fairy tales now more than ever’, which is strongly reminiscent of the much more direct German title of Bruno Bettelheim’s flawed but unavoidable classic, The Uses of Enchantment, translated into German as Kinder Brauchen Märchen, literally Children Need Fairy Tales. This almost inevitably provokes the question whether Adults Need Fairy Tales too (and there is indeed a German book with this title). However, the very distinction between child and adult readers has been called in question not only by recent ‘crossover’ fairy-tale and fantasy books (for example Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the Harry Potter series) but also by J.R.R. Tolkien’s definitive essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, which presents the association of fairy tales particularly with children as a relatively recent and unfortunate accident of history, as Willliams reminds us at the beginning of his review. The fact is that the Grimms certainly did not see their original 1812 collection of Children’s and Household Tales as actually being for children – though they were later persuaded, partly by the success of Edgar Taylor’s English translation as 11
German Popular Stories (1823), to produce versions targeting a child audience. Jack Zipes has recently reminded us of the importance of Taylor’s version, with its definitive illustrations by Cruikshank, in the reception history of Grimms’ tales (see ‘German Popular Stories as Revolutionary Book’ in his Grimm Legacies). But the version with which we are all familiar, the final, honed edition of 1857, was pretty far removed from that original 1812 version. Scholars have always known about that edition, and Zipes has already introduced a limited number of translations from it in his The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang (Hackett, 2013), where he sets them alongside the well-known 1857 versions, as well as versions by other collectors and re-tellers. However, Zipes’s latest edition of Grimm makes available for the first time in English the whole range of the 1812 edition, whose tales are notable not only for their laconic brevity, but also for their inclusion of material censored by the Grimms from their later editions. 12
The Grimms had several grounds for the exclusion of material from later editions: not only did certain tales turn out to be insufficiently ‘German’ (for example ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘Puss in Boots’), but also some contained material unsuitable for the burgeoning children’s market. For example, the original Rapunzel gives the game away not by blabbing that the witch is heavier than the prince (doh!), but by complaining that her clothes are getting too tight: the witch immediately guesses the cause of her swelling, which was of course unmentionable to the kind of middle-class audience the Grimms now had in mind. Other tales were excluded because they were too barbarically cruel for children, for example, ‘How some Children Played at Slaughtering’, which describes how some children copy their father’s slaughtering of a pig, with one of them playing at being the pig! Besides non-Germanness, the main grounds for the exclusion of tales in the original 1812 edition of Grimm are sex and violence. These 1812 originals, as well 13
as some other gruesome tales (such as ‘The Juniper Tree’) that actually made the cut, are examples of the ‘dark side’ of the Grimms’ tales, to which more recent retellings, especially film versions, claim to go back. While it is true that already in the Victorian period, and certainly in the Disney animations, much of the darker side of the Grimms’ tales is cut out, my suspicion is that this is often used by film-makers as an excuse to make their version ‘darker’ not by actually reinstating the originally censored material, but by inventing their own quasi-Gothic twists. Thus in 'Snow White and the Huntsman' (2012), which claimed to be a ‘dark’ version of ‘Snow White’, the really dark element – which is that it’s Snow White’s mother, not her step-mother as in later Grimms’ versions, who wants to eat her own daughter’s lungs and liver – is not reintroduced. Instead we have various shenanigans such as when the evil stepmother’s brother watches with incestuous lewdness as Ravenna bathes in milk (an admittedly striking, if improbable, cinematic moment) which is then fought over by peasants. However, this actually seems more silly than ‘dark’ (though the Grimms’ tales can be ‘darkly’ retold, as for example by Angela Carter, 14
and in films such as 'Pan’s Labyrinth' (2006) and 'Blancanieves' (2012)). An important consequence of returning to the earliest versions of the Grimms’ tales is that it gets away from the idea that fairy tales are primarily for children: the 1812 version was certainly not, being heavily weighted towards scholars, with hundreds of pages of notes and only 86 tales (the 1857 version has 210). The idea of fairy tales as ‘family entertainment’ grew during the Victorian period and culminated in Disney. Both Warner and Williams suggest that fairy tales are these days perhaps more for adults than children. Adults may need fairy tales as a way of negotiating a way through the woods. There may be an element of psychobabble in more recent appropriations of fairy tales (Warner has interesting sections on the re-visionings of fairy tales both by feminists and those in the so-called ‘men’s movement’); but she has the interesting idea that fairy tales (which scholars such as Zipes have insisted were radically different from myths) are ‘gradually turning into myths: stories 15
held in common about the deepest dilemmas, no longer aiming at being optimistic or consoling, but rather bearers of wisdom, deep, thought-provoking, and illuminating'. This turn to myth seems to be a corollary of fairy tales ceasing to be for children – and utopian. It is significant that Zipes has explicitly resisted the ‘mythicization of fairy tales’, turning to Roland Barthes’s classic ideologybusting Mythologies, where all that is ‘natural’ and ‘just so’ is revealed as historically conditioned forms of oppression (see especially Zipes’s Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (University Press of Kentucky, 1994)). Zipes is self-declared utopian (see the Epilogue to Grimm Legacies). But according to Warner, real ‘fairy tales’, with their child-abandonment and cannibalism, are too dark for contemporary children, and are best left to adults and those who can deal with the absence of happy endings or, more accurately perhaps, the randomness and unfairness of happy endings. So in Warner’s concluding paragraph we (adults) are left lost in the woods: We are walking through the dark forest, trying to spot the breadcrumbs and follow the path. But the birds have eaten them, and we are on our own. Now is the time when we all must become trackers and readers of signs. Fairy tales give us something to go on. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do. It is something to start with. 16
It is therefore significant that 'Into The Woods' contains the following lines Stay with me, The world is dark and wild. Stay a child while you can be a child. With me. The fact that these lines are sung by the witch to Rapunzel suggests that everything is not as it seems in this reimagination of a bunch of Grimms’ tales and characters (though ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is not, of course, in Grimm). 'Into The Woods' is, as one reviewer hyperbolically puts it, ‘full of what-ifs. Children’s fairy tales are given adult depth – making it fascinating for all ages. Of course, reimaginings of fairy tales aren’t new, but the rich imaginations of Sondheim and Lapine have probably been rivalled only by the work of the Brothers Grimm, from whom their inspiration came’. The actress Emily Blunt (who stars in 'Into The Woods') has opined that ‘children are coddled too much by sanitised modern stories and fairy tales’ and ‘should be exposed to darker stories’. She added that ‘most schools in America chose to perform only the first act of Sondheim’s play, before it takes a darker turn away from a Disney “happy ever after” ending’. So Disney appears as the debunker of ‘the Disney “happy ever after” ending’! One might almost admire the way 17
Image from Prof. Gray's article in the Telegraph.
that an icon of consumer capitalism is able to absorb criticism of itself to such an extent. This reworking of fairy tales is far from naïve, and certainly ‘knowing’ about the bleak impasses that ideologically suspicious critics have warned of. It almost sounds like a deliberate riposte to the last paragraph of Warner’s book when Robbie Collin writes: ‘The genius of Sondheim’s show is that it leads you into the thornbushes with a happy song, but then, once you’re in there, all bets are off. When a giant stomps on stage at the start of Act II, for instance, it ends up killing the narrator. Sure, for that kind of death-of-the-author stuff you can always turn to Roland Barthes, but he doesn’t have the tunes.’ 18
Fairy Tales on Stage
Les Contes d'Hoffmann is being staged at the Met Opera: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ wilborn-hampton/les-contesdhoffmann_b_6463528.html Iolanthe: Fairies invade Parliament in Gilbert and Sullivan's musical theatre piece, a University of Chichester production: http://www.alexandratheatre.co.uk/content.php?TSID=34070 Terry Jones's fairy-tale play Nicobobinus to start touring: http://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2015/jan/08/nicobobinusterry-jones-musical-adaptationreview The Wild Bride: A dark bluesinfused musical fairy tale, from the critically acclaimed Kneehigh Theatre, adapted for radio: http://www.bbc. co.uk/programmes/b03m3j76 19
A Year-Round Folklore Calendar
The 'Historic UK' website includes a wonderful calendar of British folklore. January's calendar can be found here, and includes Hogmany/New Year, doles, mummers' plays, Twelfth Night, wassailing, Plough Sunday and Burns' Night.
Free podcasts on Tolkien
The University of Oxford has published more than 6,000 podcasts by over 4,000 speakers from all over the world. Thirteen of those talks are on J.R.R. Tolkien, his life and works and his inspirations, collected at TheTolkienist.com 20
If you have any queries or feedback about this newsletter, please contact Heather Robbins at h.robbins@chi.ac.uk
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