Folktale Humor and "The Reluctant Dragon"

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Here’s a common kind of folktale: the humorous tale. Take Grimm's “The Gallant Tailor.” One thing I notice right away is its use of metaphors--not a given in the Grimm collection. Here are some examples:

And his heart quivered with joy, like a lamb’s tail.

“This is too much!” cried he, and sprang up like a madman and struck his companion such a blow that the tree shook above them.

They fled away as if they had been wild hares and none would venture to attack him.

These metaphors heighten the tale’s humor, the incongruity inherent in it. Soren Kierkegaard said that humor comes from joining two things that don’t belong together. I’ve often heard the term “apt metaphor,” but humor depends on something more like “surprising metaphor”—unexpected or inapt metaphor. Such as giants fleeing like wild hares.

Just as a fairy tale is an “apt metaphor” writ large, a humorous tale is an “unexpected metaphor” writ large. But this kind of story also uses more metaphor within the actual telling. The metaphors make the scenes funnier, which makes the story more entertaining. Or, in Mark Edmundson’s terms, they infuse the story with feeling—a humorous one.

The central metaphor for the “Gallant Tailor” is this: “his workshop seemed too small for his valor.” We ponder the incongruity throughout, even as we follow him to his triumph. By the end, this insignificant tailor will become a king. In pre-modern Europe, that’s about as absurd as you can get. But the tailor does it by being clever, as well as insanely puffed up with pride.

Let’s take a second example. I can’t help thinking of Brer Rabbit and his many close shaves. The stories are entertaining; they're funny. Part of the humor is that the smallest animal consistently outwits all the larger ones. Even Mr. Man comes out like a fool. Probably the sharpest contrast is between Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit. We all know foxes are clever, but here the rabbit is smarter.

Most of the stories turn on Brer Rabbit’s ability to bluff others into doing something that helps him and hurts them. Brer Rabbit gets what he wants—steals it, usually—and then someone else pays for it. Like “The Gallant Tailor,” Brer Rabbit stories are full of metaphors, all of them exaggerated, inapt, unexpected. Like the Gallant Tailor, he wins by being clever, even if he’s not exactly a deserving candidate for his good luck.

Contrast these traditional tales to a modern fairy story, the well-known “Reluctant Dragon” by Kenneth Grahame. Grahame’s humor is what I’d call jocular. He pokes fun in an amused sort of way. Consider this example:

What the boy chiefly dabbled in was natural history and fairy-tales, and he just took them as they came, in a sandwichy sort of way, without making any distinctions; and really his course of reading strikes one as rather sensible.

Here’s another:

"Scales, you know, and claws, and a tail for certain, though I didn’t see that end of him—I ain’t used to ’em, and I don’t hold with ’em, and that’s a fact!"

The incongruity here is of a different kind: it has to do with the absurd situation of a man discovering an actual dragon, an animal of folklore (of uncultured, pre-modern tales), in a cave. The characters in the story are afraid—the shepherd and his wife in particular—but the reader isn’t meant to be. So—in other words—we’re laughing at him, the shepherd. This comes out in the next dialogue:

“It’s all right, Father. Don’t you worry. It’s only a dragon.”

“Only a dragon?” cried his father. “What do you mean, sitting there, you and your dragons? Only a dragon indeed! And what do you know about it?”

You’ll note the overstatement and understatement, another trait in humor.

When the boy meets the dragon, he’s surprised only that the animal is purring—another incongruity. But the main one for this tale, of course, is that the dragon just wants to be a nice fellow and get along with people. He explains:

“You see, all the other fellows were so active and earnest and all that sort of thing—always rampaging and skirmishing and scouring the desert sands, and pacing the margin of the sea, and chasing knights all over the place, and devouring damsels, and going on generally—whereas I liked to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on and how they kept going on just the same, you know!”

We’re meant to laugh, I think: What a funny idea, a dragon who makes fun of other dragons from those old silly tales! What a funny idea, a dragon who just wants to live peaceably! Instead of laughing at the tailor, or laughing with Brer Rabbit, we’re laughing at those dragons of old—at the fairy tales themselves, really.

The jocular tone of the story fits it very well. It’s the appropriate form for a story that says fairy tales shouldn’t be taken seriously. Dragons are the brunt of jokes; knights in shining armor are, when you think about it, foolish kinds of characters. Or—at least they are in a modern world, where these things (we know) don’t happen, where the old tales have lost their meaning. Let’s all have a laugh at our ancestors.

As you’ve guessed, I don’t share Grahame's humor. That's because I don’t share his infatuation with the modern world and its loss of wonder. But I admire the skill with which he’s told his tale, wedding a humorous form to a humorous tale.

The form of a fairy tale

Mark Edmundson defines form as “the primary way that writers infuse their words with feeling.” A literary work’s form should be “in tune” with the story’s plot, should reveal and create emotion, and in that sense should reveal “how it feels to live the author’s truth.” In these senses, Edmundson tells us,

In the music of the lines, in the form, is an entire attitude, a bearing.

What is the “form” of a fairy story? Let me touch the iceberg here. This is John Ruskin, in “The King of the Golden River”:

And Gluck climbed to the brink of the Golden River, and its waves were as clear as crystal, and as brilliant as the sun. And, when he cast the three drops of dew into the stream, there opened where they fell a small circular whirlpool, into which the waters descended with a musical noise.

It seems to me Ruskin’s music is “as clear as crystal.” It does not cloak its meaning under metaphor. This is because a fairy story is already, in some sense, a metaphor writ large. But he does use descriptive detail in this and other scenes. His description gives a richness and color to the image I see when I read it. It invites me into nature. The feeling is there, too. It is a feeling of wonder, evoked by such primal words as “river,” “sun,” “dew,” and “whirpool.”

Here’s a more “classical” example, a few lines from “Rumpelstiltskin”:

There sat the unfortunate miller’s daughter, and for the life of her did not know what to do. She had not the least idea how to spin straw into gold, and she became more and more distressed until at last she began to weep. Then all at once the door sprang open, and in stepped a little man who said, “Good evening, Mistress Miller. What are you weeping so for?”

Here description has fallen away, and the narrator tells us only enough to bring us, without damage, to the intrusion of magic into the tale. The storyteller does build up the girl’s distress, but with a very light hand. The mundane details—what she was wearing, how she gestured when she cried, what the room and the little man looked like—are left to us to construe as we like. And we do like, I think, to construe them in our own minds (or perhaps not, for not all readers do this).

So here in Grimm we seem to have a simple form, where the magic is highlighted by the paring away of everyday detail. This holds true in the rest of the tale, until we come to this episode:

On the third day the messenger came back and said, “I haven’t been able to find any new names, but as I came round the corner of a wood on a lofty mountain, where the fox says good night to the hare, I saw a little house, and in front of the house a fire was burning. And around the fire a most ridiculous little man was leaping. He was hopping on one leg and singing …”

Here the storyteller slows down to give us description. As in Ruskin’s story, nature is the storyteller’s object, and in a poetic vein. Something like a metaphor appears in “the fox says good night to a hare,” but the whole scene is more like an etching than a realist painting. It is the crux of the story, too, and one can taste the triumph here that will come at the expense of the little man. Again, primal words like primary colors come at us: “wood,” “mountain,” “house,” “fire.” The leaping man, the “one leg”—none of this is wasted. It serves him up for our enjoyment.

“Fundevogel” (a foundling tale) works the same way, but without any humor at all. Notice how sparse is the introduction of its horrific theme:

So then the cook said, “Tomorrow morning early, when the forester goes out hunting, I am going to boil the water. And when it bubbles in the kettle, I am going to throw Fundevogel into it and boil him.”

Such sparseness of detail, just as we saw above, is characteristic of these tales. But it does not diminish the story’s horror; to me, it conveys it more directly. This is just how it happens in life. I’m not plagued by a premonition. The clouds don’t darken overhead. I just find myself in the presence of someone capable of unspeakable evil, realizing it only after the words have come out of her mouth.

The story is sparse all throughout, almost like a mourner’s tale. It’s as if the story’s emotion has been stripped out of it. But one small bit of conversation gets repeated four times.

Lina said to Fundevogel, “Do not forsake me, and I will never forsake you.”
And Fundevogel answered, “I will never forsake you as long as I live.”

This exchange, or some other untold force, allows Fundevogel to perform magic, which again is described in simple, straightforward language. The cook, “the witch,” is an embodiment of evil, a threat that comes without dark clouds or foul weather; the threat is always thwarted by magic, but that magic comes in response to this deep friendship between Lina and Fundevogel. Very little description is given in the whole tale, and it loses nothing from that. The spare sentences again have the effect of heightening the dramatic action, moving us quickly from one magical intervention to another. The witch’s frustration is disclosed by her words and demeanor. But the storyteller infuses the whole tale with feeling only at the point of that repeated vow of undying friendship. Set against an uninflected narrative voice, that quiet vow speaks eloquently.

Sources: 

Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (Bloomsbury, 2004)

R. L. Green, Modern Fairy Stories (Dutton, 1955)

Grimms' Fairy Tales, translated by E. V. Lucas, Lucy Crane and Marian Edwards (Grosset & Dunlap)

Like this? Come see my new blog, Fairy Spell.

Good and Evil in Fairy Tales - Or, "The Juniper Tree"

This is a huge topic; here’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg that I can see, and why you should maybe care.

The idea to write about this came up when I did my little study, short and flawed as it was, to find out if people are still buying fairy tales in any quantity (see "Do people still read fairy tales?"). What I found was a little surprising: Grimm outsells everybody. The Complete Grimm that Barnes & Noble puts out was ranked at 155 on their top seller lists in early January 2012. No other fairy tale book that I could find even came close to that.

So what’s the lesson there? Could be a lot of things, but I think you have to acknowledge Grimm’s appeal. What does Grimm do well? One thing that, I suspect, rings true is that these particular stories believe in good and evil. I know that’s not fashionable, but it’s true. Let me give one example.

I doesn’t get much starker than in “The Juniper Tree.” The villain, a stepmother who craves her husband’s property for her daughter instead of the dead wife’s son, allows what the story calls an “evil” thought to overpower her and cuts the boy’s head off. As if that’s not bad enough, she manages to get her daughter (whom she presumably loves less than her own skin) to think she (the daughter) killed the boy. Then she cooks the boy in a stew, which the unwitting, good-hearted father devours with a rare appetite.

So this is evil—sharp, well-defined evil. Far-fetched? A little, maybe. But I’ve seen the evening news. Enough said.

Unlike in normal life, this evil stepmother is going to get hers—and how. That’s one thing you know, when you’re reading Grimm. You see all this unfolding with horror and, even though it’s understated, it’s potent. But you know it’s somehow coming out well in the end. And it does.

The sister, poor thing, weeping and hysterical, takes the boy’s bones (removed from the empty stewpot by the stepmother) and buries them under the boy’s dead mother’s favorite juniper tree. Something magical happens—you guessed that, right?—and the boy’s bones vanish, a bird appears, and it flies away and sings a beautiful song, earning itself three strange objects. At least, so the characters in the story think, though the song lyrics are terrible. “My mother murdered me, my father ate of me …”

I won’t go through the whole thing. Cut to the happy ending: the father gets a beautiful gold necklace, the sister gets a beautiful pair of shoes, and the stepmother gets a millstone on her head. The bird goes back to being the boy. The end.

There’s even a little more on this line, but that’s enough to give the gist.

Now, picking up a modern fairy tale, or a modern retelling of a fairy tale, or a modern fantasy novel (or many other kinds of novels), off the shelf, you don’t know two things going in: (1) if there’s going to be a real villain, who’s understandable but still wicked in the old sense of “bad,” “not good”; and (2) if there’s going to be a “happy ending,” in the sense that bad people will get punished and good ones will win through. Actually there’s a third: you don’t know if there’s going to be anybody that’s “good” in the story either; I mean, a hero you can want to live through it and thrive.

Picking up Grimm, you can basically assume (1) and (2) at least, and usually you’ll get (3) into the bargain. These aren’t religious stories; they aren’t “Christian,” for instance. But they are profoundly moral: they believe in right and wrong. And part of the satisfying nature of them is this “right and wrong,” good and evil, punishment and reward, quality.

Could it be that people are reading Grimm because they, too, believe in good and evil, punishment and reward? Seems likely. Crime shows are among the very most popular on television—especially the ones that believe in punishments for evildoers, and vindication for victims. They too are profoundly moral. You might not agree with all of their morals, but they are moral in that sense.

Whereas what could be more disappointing than spending hours reading a thick fantasy novel and finding, at the end, that (1) there wasn’t really any bad guy; or (2) the bad guy wasn’t at all believable; or (3) there wasn’t any character with a shred of integrity or loyalty (they were all bad guys); or (4) there wasn’t a good, satisfying outcome (nobody who deserved it got punished, or won the day)? Grimm will give you most or all of those in just about every three-to-five page story. That translates to hours of satisfying reading.

But, so this won’t get lost in the middle, I want to re-emphasize two points about Grimm. One is that few if any of the heroes are “good” in the sense of being perfect or untouchably moral. Some are tricksters, clever, almost swindlers. Some are just loyal to somebody—a small kind of “goodness” that, however, is very powerful in life. The second point is that the thrill of the stories seems to derive at least partly from how the magic will be involved—sometimes on the dark side, sometimes on the light side, sometimes on both. Strange to say, I can feel my pulse rise even though I know the thing’s going to come out right. Maybe that shows how naïve I am—me and thousands of others.

Beautiful Grimm Illustrations

One of my favorite blogs, Brain Pickings, recently highlighted this illustrated volume, The Fairy Tales of the Brother Grimm (ed. by Noel Daniel). It features some classic artwork, which you can sample here:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/09/28/brothers-grimm-fairy-tales-taschen/

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Do people still read fairy tales?

As far as I can tell with the blunt instruments of Amazon.com’s sales rankings and Barnes&Noble.com’s sales rankings, Grimm’s fairy tales are still outselling most modern fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen’s tales also do respectably well. Other fairy tale collections (by lesser-known figures), not so much. Modern retellings and original tales in the fairy tale tradition, anthologized by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow (several volumes now), also do respectably well, especially Snow White, Blood Red. But they still don’t match Grimm.

I have no idea (a) why Grimm is the juggernaut; and (b) whether people read these stories once they’ve bought them. But the sales suggest that a lot of people do. They want to own them, often in nice-looking volumes. I for one have (somehow) three editions of Grimm on the self, and one of Andersen. Plus some other things, still not nearly enough. (Tolkien writes about Lang’s 12-volume collection and I salivate.)

That proves, I guess, that people do like to read fairy stories, even when they’re new ones being written today. But, unless my research was fundamentally flawed (which is likely, given how late at night I did it, among other things), they prefer them older than newer, all things being equal.

That somehow doesn’t seem at all wrong, does it? Andersen’s tales, by the way, were his own invention. But now that they’ve been around so long—and are so good—they pass into the status of tradition. And Grimm seems to capture that sense of tradition more than others. That collection, too, is the least sanitized for children. But that’s for another post.

Meanwhile, novels with a basis (or at least a hook) in fairy tales or mythic traditions were in Amazon’s top 100 book-list for week one of January 2012. Three of them, in fact (and this is not a recommendation, since I haven’t read any of these):

#34: Switched, by Amanda Hocking (a changeling story)

#41: The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht (folktale and fairy tale motifs) 41

#72: The Son of Neptune, by Rick Riordan (middle grade, drawing on myth and fable)

Whether they still read the old tales or not, lots of readers seem to be craving novels grounded in folktales and fairy tales.