Hans Christian Andersen is a bastard

This post has been brewing for a while.


Before we left California, I was wandering through the mall and I stumbled past a kid's store that was playing some Disney music - earworms, every single tune - and included in the craptacular soundblast was some blathering from The Little Mermaid.

Man, did they change THAT ending.

This really shouldn't go in my mythology category, because by and large I'm interested in the old root tales, and The Little Mermaid was written fairly recently (published 1837.) But it's such a terrible story, and got altered so much, that I couldn't leave it alone.

The Disney line of bullshit is the usual one. Plucky heroine defies her parents in order to gain the love and attention of a prince. Things do not go her way until she learns a lesson and grows up a little, and then the prince comes to her rescue. They live happily ever after. Much singing and rejoicing.





We will gloss over my thoughts about the prince coming to the rescue, simply noting that it's a big lie and repeating it in every single story doesn't make it any more true.











And it's completely different from the actual story. In the written work, the mermaid falls in love with the prince and defies her parents. Things do not go her way, until the prince marries someone else and she dies. That's right, she turns into sea foam, and then into air, where she learns that if she is good and noble in the afterlife, she might possibly go to heaven. Screw her entire life, that's wasted, but hey, she might be able to have a soul. Someday.

Andersen also wrote The Little Match Girl, about a sweet and deserving urchin who starves to death in the snow while hallucinating that she might get a big warm dinner once she gets to - you guessed it - heaven.

A lot of his writing is about completely innocent creatures sunk in misery who will have a better life once they're dead. And there's a uniquely Victorian piety about the whole thing, like he's standing around moaning "won't somebody think of the children" when instead of writing and moralizing and babbling about them going to a better world he could have maybe given one of them a fucking sandwich except he was so busy praying that they STARVED TO DEATH IN THE SNOW.

Anybody who would offer a starving child a prayer instead of a bowl of soup is an asshole. Writing children's stories and pretending that dead children are better off is a whole new level of sanctimonious bastardry.



So. Hans Christian Andersen sucks. And yeah, I know he also wrote The Emperor's New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling and those are fine, but on behalf of The Little Match Girl, I hereby declare him a bastard.

Watch Out for Warts.

You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.

We’ve all heard that.

Usually after you get back from a date with a creep, one of your friends will trot this out to make you feel better. It’s supposed to evoke the story of the Frog Prince, where the princess kisses a frog to transform him to a handsome prince. Of course, like nearly all modern stories, it’s a big fat candy coated lie.

The Grimm story, Iron Henry, does indeed include a princess and a frog. The princess loses her golden ball, and the frog returns it to her. (I will gloss over all the bad jokes and Freudian implications here.) She has promised him the reward of sharing her supper and her bed in return for this service. Of course, once she has the ball in her hands she breaks all her promises and runs away because it’s just a nasty frog.

She does eventually keep her promises, because her father forces her to make good. At the end of the night, she throws the frog against the wall, hoping for a good splat and a quiet night’s sleep, but he then transforms into a prince who wants to marry her. The original story is European, mostly appearing in English and Germanic sources, but it shows up around the world with variants in Sri Lanka, Korea, and China.

I’ve always found this story a bit odd.

For one thing, the princess is beautiful but clearly a spoiled self-centered brat. And for another, she doesn’t show any kindness at all toward the frog, but rather a deliberate cruel streak. What exactly does the prince see in her again? I’m pretty sure that there are going to be some domestic violence charges somewhere down the road for this family.

The kiss got added later, when we modern humans tried to make the whole thing about love and romance. Romance itself is a concept that wasn’t around when the story first appeared, back in the thirteenth century or so. That may be why it makes no freaking sense.

Animal bridegrooms are a big, big section of mythology. Far too much to cover in one post, in fact, so I’m going to just stick to magical frogs.

You can understand, I’m sure, why the frog seemed so magical to the earliest storytellers. They do, in fact, transform. If they can change from tadpoles to hopping bullfrogs, maybe they can change even further and we just haven’t caught them at it. If you’re in Asia, frogs are good luck and probably bring wealth. If you’re in South America, they’re a vital ingredient in blowdart poison. If you’re a Pacific Northwest hippie, you’re licking toads for the hallucinogens.

See? Magic.

And if you were a toad – or a lowly peasant, or a deformed leper, man, don’t you wish you could change, too? So it’s easy to see where the idea of transformation, particularly a transformation from ugly slimy warty toad to handsome rich prince, is an attractive thing. The stories very rarely address the front end of the transaction where the prince gets cursed and becomes the frog, because that is neither hopeful nor fascinating.

Everyone who reads this story understands right away what’s in it for the princess. She acts like Paris Hilton, gets yelled at by her dad, throws a tantrum, and gets the reward of her ideal husband. Wait, WTF? She doesn’t have to be good, or kind, or virtuous in any way whatsoever. Just gets rewarded for being a princess.

The appeal of this is so widespread that getting some illustrations together for this post is requiring me to wade through page after page of tasteless commercial variations of a little plastic frog with a little plastic crown glued to it’s little plastic head.

What nobody has been able to tell me is what’s in it for the prince. What does HE get out of the deal? The nicest thing you can say about the princess is that she looks okay as long as she doesn’t talk. I guess he gets to not be a frog, and maybe flies taste bad enough that not being a frog is its own reward.

Or maybe he did something terrible that led to the curse in the first place, and his sentence isn’t lifted, just transformed. Maybe she’s the next punishment. Maybe their kids will have warts.

Or take out the pasted-on romantic crap, and perhaps he inherits the kingdom by marriage, and his reward is not the girl at all, but the money attached to her. So the frog is a money grubbing gigolo, and he and the princess deserve each other.

And they lived happily ever after.

Or, you know, not.

Fairy Tale, Hairy Tale

One of the things I find so very interesting about fairy tales is how far we’ve edited them from the original forms. In our modern, post-Puritanical, won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children modern world, we’ve changed stories nearly beyond recognition.

I didn’t notice this right away. I had it pointed out to me by a child.

About ten or twelve years ago, I was visiting my mother. One of my nieces was there – she was about five at the time – and we started talking about the video she was watching. It was Rapunzel, and since I am not the most child-friendly person, the best conversational opening I had was “what’s it about?”

She said, very seriously, “A girl who lives in a tower with a witch. She’s sooo beautiful that she can’t get out.” Thoughtful pause. “Nobody can escape and go do stuff until a prince comes to rescue them. “

I said, “Nobody? Does EVERYBODY need to have a prince?”

With the exaggerated patience of someone lecturing to the dimwitted, she said, “Yes! You can’t go anywhere if your prince doesn’t show up! Nobody can do anything until the prince gets there!”

Well.

What exactly was the message here? Your life doesn’t start until there’s a man in it? I didn’t like this one bit. I corrected things by teaching her a version where Rapunzel cuts her own hair, braids it into a ladder, runs away to the city, and gets a job. Rapunzel is not stuck, and isn’t waiting around for anybody. She’s got things to do and she by god gets them done.

And of course what I’m doing is editorializing, after the fact. Changing the story to make it fit our modern ideas of right and wrong. I’m altering the tale to give the message I think is appropriate, just like Disney does. The difference is that … well, I was going to try and take the moral high ground, but my high horse is in the shop.

The original story doesn’t allow Rapunzel to escape. She holds the key to her own liberty – the hair – but somehow she’s unable to use it.

The Maiden in the Tower – well, she’s a prize to be won, not an active character. If you’re familiar with the original, you know the girl starts life as a bad trade, given up by her parents in payment of the lettuce her mother craved. She’s kept in a tower, companion to the witch, until a prince finds a way to climb up the tower. They hatch a long, slow escape plan, which gets blown to smithereens when the witch notices that her darling girl is preggers and can’t fit into her clothes very well anymore. (I guess the prince is pretty darn charming, after all.)

The girl gets banished to the desert, where she gives birth to twins. The prince falls from the tower into a big pile of thorns and is blinded. Years later, he wanders into her path, she cures his blindness, and the lovers are reunited.

A lot of this story got changed pretty early on, of course. Around the mid-1800’s, the prince decided to propose marriage, and somehow the pregnancy got swept under the rug. Rapunzel fell in love with the prince, instead of being a silly easily tricked girl. I know it’s possible to blame Disney for princess marketing and branding, and oh I really do blame them, but the Victorians had some pretty uptight ideas that got implemented, too.

Even earlier versions of the Maiden in the Tower have an actual active heroine, instead of an object, a prize to be handed around and discarded once deflowered and therefore spoiled. And it’s funny how stories have echoes of other stories within them….

The Prince leaps from the Tower to escape.

Familiar?

The princess, Rapunzel, once she has (carnal) knowledge, is banished from the Garden. I can’t help wondering if her twins were named Cain and Abel.

So the threads of other stories and archetypes weave in and out of everything. Of course, now, when you do a search for blog illustrations, you have to sift through endless pages of Rapunzel Barbie. To get at the original stories, you have to sift through the bright sunny cheerful and above all plastic face that we’ve put on everything.

I can’t help but wonder why we’re so insistent that everything be so frelling cheerful all the time. If nothing else, we’re setting ourselves up for a huge disappointment, because life is not always cheerful. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. I’m just slightly more positive than that, actually, but it’s a quote from Thomas Hobbes (1651) and I’m always trying to find a way, no matter how small, to use my college education. My point is that we have changed one set of stories – the fairy tales – and since everything is connected, the change vibrates down the strings to other stories, and if we’re not careful we end up in one big irritating episode of My Little Pony.

Here’s hoping that modern marketing hasn’t distorted the tapestry too badly, and that the stories continue to weave and grow.

Myth Perceptions

I was having a conversation with a dear friend of mine, when somehow or other we got onto the subject of fairy tales. She loves Disney, and likes the sweet fantasy of happy endings.

I’m sure you’re all terribly surprised to hear that I favor a darker approach.

Before anybody starts forming any mental pictures, I’m not a goth.

Mostly because I’m too old, and while young men and women look lovely in goth clothes (and even lovelier in steampunk garb) older ladies just look creepy.

I AM creepy, and even sinister, but I don’t see any point in dressing to advertise it.

I keep the dark side hidden. But I believe that all things have a balance, and that to have the sweet glittery fluffy cupcake, there’s also the dark and terrifying clang of the oven door. Hope it’s not too hot in there!

Anyway, I’m a lifelong fan of fairy tales and mythology of the world.


It started at an early age. Talking to my mom a few years back, she expressed regret over something she bought – a set of children’s books, from a door to door salesman. My parents were young and struggling, and had very little money, but my mom saw deep longing on my face and spent more than she should have. In remembering the incident, she said she didn’t know if the books were worth it.

What she didn’t realize, until that conversation, is how dearly I loved those books. I remember them vividly. There were fairy tales of all sorts – The Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, Aesop’s Fables, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault. To my further delight, they included 1001 Nights (the tales told by Scheherazade), extensive Greco-roman mythology, the Rudyard Kipling Jungle Books and all of the Just So Stories, all of the Alice in Wonderland books, Treasure Island, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson….
THAT’S how you get a child with an active imagination. To this day, it’s pretty hard to mention a fairy tale or a myth and not hear my opinions and comments on the origin and meanings. I’ve added to the book collection, somewhat – it now includes The Golden Bough, Bullfinch’s Mythology, and Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I love the early, truly grim versions of the classic fairy tales. They weren’t written for children – society in those days did not think of childhood the way we do, as a safe, warm, fluffy place. They were stories for the whole tribe to nod over and discuss, and they contain some damn good advice:


If you talk about fairy tales, I’m likely to have an opinion. I have so much of an opinion, as a matter of fact, that I’m going to break this down into a series because nobody, not even my nearest and dearest (I’m talking about the dog) has the patience to listen to the whole damn thing at once.
So… if you like going into the woods, if you feel sorry for the wicked witch, if you think that the Prince is late all the time and quite frankly not all that charming, come sit by the fire with me. I have a story to tell.