The White Duck

 This is a Russian fairy tale which I read in The Yellow Fairy Book.

We open with a king going off to war, giving his wife strict instructions for his time away—never leave the castle, don’t interact with strangers, especially don’t trust strange women.

Surely, you all know what’s going to happen next.

In the queen’s defense, we have no idea how long she’s been cooped up in the castle. It could be months. It could even be years. “Never, ever, ever leave the house” is pretty rough, even if you’re lucky enough to live in a very large house.

An old lady comes up to the window and convinces the queen to come down to the garden. Then she convinces her to go swimming in a pond.

Then she turns her into a duck.

The old woman assumes the queen’s form, and is there to greet the king when he comes home.

Meanwhile, the queen turned duck has left the royal grounds and laid three eggs, which hatch into three little ducklings—two girls and a boy. So we probably have an answer to how long the king’s been gone—less than nine months. Unless he’s not the father, which raises a lot of questions I’m not prepared to fully consider at this moment.

The queen warns the ducklings to stay away from the castle, because a wicked witch lives there. It doesn’t seem to even occur to her to attempt to communicate with her husband, or try to get her own body back? Like, as far as we know she’s still capable of human speech—later events will confirm this. Her husband warned her against both going outside and strange women, so presumably he knew that something like this happening was a risk. She could probably find him and explain the situation. Does she not care? Does she prefer being a duck? Does she not think that, even if she’s content in this form, her children might have better lives as princes and princesses than as ducks?

Inevitably, the ducklings ignore their mother’s warnings, play in the palace gardens, and get caught by the witch, who is still impersonating their mother in her human queen form. She pretends to be nice, feeds them, brings them inside, and gives them a cushion to sleep on.

Then she goes down to the kitchen, gets a knife, and has the servants start a kettle boiling.

She kills the ducklings. Repeat, she kills the ducklings. Our three young heroes have just been murdered.

 However, she apparently never gets as far as actually cooking them.

The duck queen goes in search of her children. She goes to the palace and sings a song about how a witch turned her into a duck, stole her husband, and killed her kids.

Like, why didn’t you do this months ago?

As soon as the king picks her up she changes back to her own shape. She happens to have a magic potion back in her nest, so they collect it and use it to revive the dead children, who also turn into humans. The witch comes to a “no good end,” and everyone else lives happily ever after.

Okay, so. How much time has passed here? Ducks and humans age very differently. The ducklings were able to talk. They were allowed to go out and play unsupervised. Did they go from being adolescent ducks to being human infants or toddlers? Or did they transform into humans of an equivalent age to their duck forms? Does the king suddenly have three unexpected ten years olds?

And seriously, why did the duck queen not approach her husband sooner? Was touching him literally all it took to break the spell?

And then. She just happens to have a vial of un-killing potion? In her duck nest? When and how and why did she acquire this?

Did the kids transform because she transformed? Was their enchantment linked to hers? That would make the most sense. However, the story specified that after she transformed, they were still ducks. The potion changed them from dead ducks to living humans. Which would imply that the potion caused the transformation.

Like, probably the spells were linked, and the kids didn’t transform immediately when the queen did because they were dead.

But wouldn’t it be so funny if this woman had a potion of “Un-die and Also De-Duck” in her nest, and was just sitting on it?

I kind of think she likes being a duck. She didn’t even try to go back to her husband until the kids were in danger. I can totally believe that she also had a spell breaking potion and just didn’t use it.

Overall, there are three things I really want from this story.

1. Backstory explaining the king’s warning against strange women and going outside. Like, how did he know this was a concern? Beware of strangers, yeah, okay, but never leaving the house is a pretty serious restriction. He must have had a reason to expect something to go wrong.

2. The story of how the duck queen acquired her magic potion.

3. A sequel about the struggles of children born and raised as ducks, now living as human royalty. The struggles of the king to adapt to parenting three former ducks. The progression of the king and queen’s relationship after he’s spent an unknown time living with an imposter, and she’s spent an unknown time living as a duck, and not apparently making any effort to get back to him.

A story about a duck somehow getting an unkilling potion, especially, sounds like it could be super fun. I definitely want to know more about her duck adventures.

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.

The Disney-fication of Folklore

 There's this new thing now where people aren't just retelling stories, they're retelling the Disney version of stories. I mean, okay, it's been going on for several years, but a new thing within, like, the last generation or so, which is pretty new considering the very long history of fairy tales. There are at least two separate Disney-authorized book series like that. And some of them are decent, and some of them are terrible, but all of them are just—just—

Those aren't fairy tale retellings. Those are Disney fanfiction. And we've talked, before, about the relationship between fanfic and folklore, but this is different. When the bookstore is full of retellings of Disney's Cinderella, instead of just Cinderella, we're losing important pieces of our history, our culture.

The way we tell folktales changes with time and region; that's normal and expected. But the way it's changed over the last 90 years or so, specifically—people tend to think that there is one correct version of the story, and the version they think is correct  belongs to someone, and we need his permission to retell it. That's not a normal relationship to folklore. That's not a healthy relationship to folklore.

We’ve got Disney’s Twisted Tales Series. We’ve got Disney’s Villains Series. We’ve got Disney’s Descendants, which is allegedly about the children of specifically the Disney versions of characters, even when it doesn’t always make sense. We’ve got Once Upon a Time, which started out as a show based on fairy tales in general, with some familiar references because it was still being produced by a Disney-owned company, which over the course of a few seasons transitioned to be more and more Disney-centric. We’ve got Disney’s live action fairy tale movies, which had a promising start with things like Cinderella, which was just its own Cinderella movie, before they started copying their own previous movies line for line.

And it’s just so frustrating because Disney’s versions of these stories are a drop in the bucket of a several hundred year history, and somehow we’ve gotten to the point where so many people don’t seem to be aware of anything else, and the market is being flooded with more and more Disney-centric fairy tales.

I love many of Disney’s animated fairy tale movies, very much. But there’s so much more out there. I’m so sick of trying to look up a three hundred year old story, and having to put fifteen qualifiers on my search in an attempt to avoid Disney, and then somehow still having to sort through six pages of Disney-related results before I can get to anything useful.

I don’t have, like, a point or anything. I’m just frustrated.                       

There are so many good stories that have nothing to do with Disney. So many good stories that Disney has done stuff with, but you should still read the non-Disney versions—some of them are better, and some of them are worse, but all of them are different, and worth your time.

 

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.

The Wizard King

 This is a French fairy tale by a Chevalier de Mailly, but I read it in Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book.

We begin with a wizard king, a queen, and a secret fairy godmother. Apparently, wizards and fairies do not get on, prompting the queen to hide her godmother from her husband. But she does introduce her to their son.

The queen dies. The prince remains secretly in touch with his fairy god-grandma. The king, after a period of mourning, decides to travel, which he does in the forms of various animals. One day, as an eagle, he comes across the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

So naturally, he decides to swoop down and grab her.

The king sets up the kidnapped princess in an enchanted palace, reveals his true form, and refuses to release her. He holds her there in secret, sneaking away to visit whenever he can.

This king may be a great wizard, but he's not very smart, is he?

Like, dude. You’re a handsome, wealthy, powerful, widowed king. Sure, there’s a bit of an age gap, but parents of princesses, arranging political marriages, seldom seem bothered by that. You could have presented yourself properly as a suitor, and you probably would have been able to marry her. Why would you turn into an eagle and kidnap her instead?

The princess continues to refuse the romantic advances of her kidnapper. Good for her. The king, idiot that he is, concludes that the only possible reason for her disinterest is that she’s somehow found out about his son, who is in every way better than him.

So he sends his son to travel in other lands. Except another land is where he kidnapped this girl from in the first place. Our prince soon meets her parents, hears about how she was abducted by an eagle, falls madly in love with her portrait, and vows to find and save her.

The prince’s secret fairy god-grandma tells him that his father is holding her prisoner in an enchanted palace. The prince doesn’t exactly seem surprised when he finds out his father has kidnapped a princess.

There is an enchanted cloud around the palace, too strong for the fairy to penetrate. However, the princess has with her a parrot, which is permitted to fly through the cloud.  The prince collects the parrot the next time it comes through, the fairy turns the prince into a matching parrot, and the prince is then able to fly through the cloud and find the princess.

He resumes his natural form and tells her who he is and that he’s come to save her. The fairy sends through a chariot pulled by eagles—so much for the cloud being impenetrable, I guess. The king realizes what’s happening, and goes to chase them down. The prince and princess have an immediate wedding because the fairy says that will protect them from the king.

The king arrives, attempts to kill them both, and fails. He’s put in prison, but the prince asks for him to be released. He flees immediately, vowing never to forgive his son or the fairy. The prince, princess, and fairy god-grandma live happily ever after.

I don’t actually have a lot to say about this story; I just thought it was fun.

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.

Read Your Source Material

 Not to, like, gatekeep fairy tale retellings, but how many authors who've retold Beauty and the Beast do you think have actually read Beauty and the Beast? This is a story that's been around for 280 years, and I have never read a retelling that was not very clearly influenced by variants that have only existed for the last 70 years. That's a quarter of the history of this story.

I've read so many BATB retellings, and so many of them are so, so good. I'm not complaining about any of these specific books. Just, like, the trend in retellings, and the fact that it's apparently normal not to even read the source material before writing an entire book about it. It's just...weird. I mean, it's not just me, right? That's weird.

There's dozens if not hundreds of variants of Cinderella, and I wouldn't expect someone to read every single one of them. But Beauty and the Beast isn't a folktale. It has a clear origin point. I wouldn't expect a reteller to read every version of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, or even necessarily to track down and read the earliest documented version. But I would expect you to read The Little Mermaid, or The Wizard of Oz. Not read a picture book based on The Little Mermaid, or watch the MGM movie. Read the books. Because those aren't just fairy tales, they're also books that have authors.

I think, because it was written so long ago, pre-copyright laws, and because it became so popular, people have largely forgotten that Beauty and the Beast is also a book that has an author.

The source material is right there. Why wouldn't you read it? And it's not just Villeneuve; as I read more and more retellings that are clearly influenced by the Shirley Temple version, I'm starting to doubt that all of these authors have even read Beaumont or Lang.

You are welcome to tell your version of Beauty and the Beast exactly the way you want to, obviously, regardless of how it relates to any other versions. But why wouldn't you want to read the original first, and at least see if it has any ideas to offer? If you don't want to bother tracking it down, I have already tracked it down for you, and it’s here. And if you don’t want to take the time to read something so much longer than the average fairy tale, even reading something like the detailed summary on Wikipedia is useful.

VISIT PATREON.COM/KONGLINDORM FOR EARLY ACCESS TO POSTS.