Hermod and Hadvor

 This is an Icelandic story from the Yellow Fairy Book.

We begin with a widowed king, his daughter Hadvor, and his foster son Hermod. Hermod and Hadvor secretly pledged as children to marry each other, so not a sibling relationship.

The king once promised his wife to only ever remarry if he was marrying the Queen of Hetland the Good. Oddly specific, but a lot less problematic than the standard “only someone as beautiful as me,” which has the unfortunate tendency to result in attempted incest.

Anyway, the king meets a woman claiming to be Hetland; he meets her in a secondary location, since she allegedly recently escaped pirate kidnappers. Strangely, she doesn’t have any inclination to return home, let her people know she’s survived, collect her things, set up a plan to either rule remotely or appoint a regent, etc. Just agrees to marry the king, and she, her daughter, and her maid go home with him. 

Dude. This is so shady. You meet a random woman, tell her you’re a king searching for Hetland so you can marry her, and she magically happens to be her? You need some proof of identity.

Hadvor and Hermod aren’t much interested in the alleged queen and princess, but Hadvor becomes good friends with the maid, whose name is Olof.

At some point, the king goes off to war, which is always when trouble starts.

Allegedly-Hetland wants Hermod to marry her daughter. Hermod says no. So she curses him to go to a desert island, be a lion by day and a man by night, and always be thinking of Hadvor. The spell can be broken only by Hadvor burning his lion skin.

Hermod curses her right back, which is the first and last mention of Hermod having any magical powers. He says that as soon as his curse is broken, she’ll become a rat, her daughter will become a mouse, and they’ll fight in the throne room until he kills them with his sword.

So now Hermod is missing, and the king is still gone, but fortunately we have a solution in the form of Olof, who conveniently knows exactly what the queen did to Hermod, exactly how to undo it, and also what the queen is planning to do to Hadvor. She’s going to turn her three headed giant brother from the underworld into a beautiful prince and get Halvor to marry him. (And the brother pretty much confirms my suspicion that this woman is not actually Hetland.)

In the course of her massive info dump, Olof also lets us know that she was kidnapped by the queen and forced to serve her, but the queen can’t actually hurt her because she has a magic green cloak. Then she says that the giant brother will be coming up through the floor, and should be easily eliminated by some blazing pitch.

This girl really does have all the answers.

Some time passes. The king comes home, and is very distressed to find Hermod missing. (Hadvor, this would have been a great time for you and Olof to share some info with your dad.) Hadvor makes a habit of having blazing pitch always on hand, which I imagine raises a lot of questions among the staff.

Finally she hears the sound of the ground opening and someone coming up through the floor, and she pours her pitch. The queen finds her brother in the morning, burned to a crisp, and proceeds with her plan to turn him into a beautiful prince. She also casts a spell so that Hadvor can’t say anything in her own defense.

Then she accuses Hadvor of murdering her poor innocent brother.

Now, we know Hadvor can’t defend herself, but she doesn’t even get the chance, because despite there being absolutely no evidence that she killed this man, the king, without even trying to speak with her, immediately believes that she did it, and leaves her punishment to his wife.

This king is the biggest idiot I’ve covered in, like, at least two weeks.

The queen plans to put Hadvor into a burial mound with her brother, where presumably she’ll suffocate and die.

But the all-knowing Olof comes through for us again! She tells Hadvor how to escape the giant’s ghost, and how to get more info about Hermod while she’s at it.

Actually, I retract “all-knowing.” She told us the pitch would take care of this guy, which clearly it did not if we now have a ghost to contend with. And apparently she doesn’t know exactly where Hermod is, since Hadvor is supposed to get that information from the ghost.

Hadvor goes into the mound, along with the giant ghost and his two dogs. The ghost wants his body cut up and fed to the dogs, which Hadvor does in exchange for the location of Hermod’s desert island, and the information that she can only reach it by taking the skin off the soles of his feet and using them to make herself shoes, which will be able to walk on both land and sea.

Ew.

She’s already cutting him up for the dogs, so she pockets the soles. The ghost then lets her stand on his shoulders to escape the mound—it is unclear why he’s helping her get out or how she’s able to stand on the shoulders of a ghost.

At the last minute he tries to grab her and pull her back down, but Olof warned her about this; she’s wearing a large cloak, which she unclasps, escaping and leaving him with the cloak.

Hadvor reaches the island with her disgusting shoes, but on the island runs into a cliff she doesn’t know how to get past. She dreams that night of a woman who promises to drop a rope for her. She also promises to leave her a belt that will keep her from being hungry.

She wakes up, puts on the belt, and finds the rope. She reaches the top of the cliff and finds a little cave where she waits. Before long, a lion comes in, sheds his skin, and becomes Hermod. She takes the skin and burns it immediately, and then they have their reunion.

They’re not sure how to get back home, since there’s only one pair of shoes, so they go ask the local witch, who has fifteen sons and sends people helpful dreams and anti-hunger belts.

The witch lends them a boat, but warns them that the ghost giant has now turned into a giant fish—this guy really doesn’t let death slow him down, does he?—and will probably attack them. if he does, they can call her for help.

The fish attacks. They call for help. The witch and all fifteen of her sons turn into whales and take care of that, and then they’re home free.

The king, meanwhile, is worried about his missing wife and stepdaughter, and incredibly frustrated by this rat and mouse that are constantly fighting in his hall, which no one can get rid of.

Hermod and Hadvor come in, Hermod kills them, and their bodies turn into witches. It is unclear whether they returned to the bodies the king was accustomed to seeing them in, or if that was a disguise and they are now in some other, original form.

They tell the king everything, they get married, and Olof marries a nice nobleman. No mention is made of trying to return Olof to her home and family. No mention is made of the queen and her daughter leading active ghost lives like her brother. The text never tells us whether or not she was really Hetland, but I’m going to stick with my original theory of “absolutely not,” since there is literally no evidence, this woman has been proven to be a liar, she has a brother who is not human, and her behavior is not consistent with someone known as “the Good.”

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The Witch

 The Witch, as I’m sure will surprise no one at this point, is also a Russian fairy tale from the Yellow Fairy Book. It’s sort of Hansel and Gretel meets Little Red Riding Hood.

A woman has two step children—a little boy and a little girl—who she hates. One day she sends them out into the woods to visit her grandmother.

They decide to stop and visit their own grandmother on the way. She tells them the woman they’re on their way to meet isn't actually their step-great-grandma; she’s an evil witch! Then she gives them some milk, bread, and ham, and sends them on their way. To the witch. Instead of, you know, keeping them at her house, or going to find their dad and asking, “hey, are you aware your wife is trying to murder your kids?”, or any of the sensible things one could do when faced with two small grandchildren on their way to certain death.

The children reach the witch, and are assigned some tasks to complete, otherwise she’ll fry and eat them. She sets the girl to spinning yarn, and the boy to fetching water from the well with a sieve.

Some mice help with the yarn in exchange for bread. Some birds tell the boy how to stop up the sieve with clay so it can hold water, in exchange for more bread. A cat gives them an enchanted comb, an enchanted handkerchief, and directions home in exchange for ham.

The next day, they make their escape. A dog is going to stop them, but they give him some more bread—seriously, how much bread do these children have?—so he lets them go. Some enchanted trees try to stop them next, but the girl ties their branches back with ribbons.

The witch discovers that the children are gone, and that her pets and servants have let them go because the children treated them better than she ever did. She goes after them on her broomstick, but they use the handkerchief to make a deep river to slow her down, and then the comb to make a dense forest. She can’t get through the forest, so gives up and goes home.

The children go home, too, and tell their father what happened. He’s furious, and drives their stepmother out of the house, never to be seen again. Which is THE APPROPRIATE WAY TO HANDLE THIS SITUATION. Take notes, dad from last week.

Also. They didn’t have to go through any of this. Their dad was not aware of or on board with this plan. Their grandma knew it was a trap. If she had just TOLD THE KIDS NOT TO GO, and TALKED TO THEIR FATHER ABOUT THE SITUATION, the whole mess could have been avoided.

I’m a big fan of dad who do not let their wives murder their kids.

One unanswered question I have is why the grandma sent the kids off with milk. Was it just for them to drink? The bread and ham went to various animals, and the girl provided her own ribbons to deal with the trees, but the milk is never mentioned again. It’s probably not of any significance, but I’m particularly attuned to instances of unexplained milk because I still don’t understand the relevance of milk to King Lindorm.

The only other really noteworthy thing about this story is the broomstick. Witches have been depicted flying on broomsticks for hundreds of years. Fairy tales are chock full of witches. But I think this is the first time I’ve ever encountered a witch flying on a broomstick in a fairy tale.

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The Story of King Frost

 The Story of King Frost is yet another Russian fairy tale—The Yellow Fairy Book is very Russia-heavy.

We start, as we so often do, with a poorly blended family. Widower, widower’s wonderful daughter, widower’s second wife, and second wife’s awful daughter. But this stepmother is…she’s really something.

Bullying and abusing your stepdaughter, okay, yeah, we’ve all seen that. Trying to get rid of your stepdaughter? It’s been done before. But this woman openly tells her husband, “I want your daughter dead.”

She wants him to abandon the girl in a field in the winter, so she’ll freeze to death.

I’m gonna go ahead and quote the story here for the father’s response to this suggestion:  “In vain did the poor old father weep and implore her pity; she was firm, and he dared not gainsay her.”

I’m sorry, you implored her pity? She was firm? You dared not disagree? Dude, get a grip. You’re gonna abandon your kid to freeze to death because your wife was FIRM about it? There should be no imploring of pity, here. You should not even be trying to convince your wife to change her mind. The correct response to “I think we should murder your daughter” is “get out of my house before I murder you.”

This absolute loser does as his wife says and abandons the girl.

In the freezing field, the girl meets the frost king. She’s very polite, he’s very impressed, he sends her safely home with a bunch of furs and jewels and a beautiful gold and silver dress.

She appears back at the house with all this while the stepmother is making pancakes for the funeral, and arguing with her talking dog, who’s warning her that her stepdaughter is gonna be just fine, but her own daughter will soon die.

Side note: I’m intrigued by the idea of funeral pancakes. Maybe pancakes are too fun to suit the general mood of a funeral, but I like it. Apparently it’s a Russian tradition.

Ignoring the talking dog, the stepmother demands that her husband also abandon her daughter in the frozen field, so she can get all this cool stuff too. But this girl is very rude to the frost king, so he freezes her to death, and when her mother touches her body, she freezes to death too.

Which is the end of the story.

This follows the same general pattern as a great many stories—wicked stepmother despises stepdaughter, stepdaughter rewarded for good behavior while daughter punished for bad behavior. There are two things that make it interesting to me.

Firstly, the frost king. Generally, the role of punisher-and-rewarder goes to an old woman, so we’re already breaking the pattern there. But usually if we see any kind of king in a story like this, he’ll end up marrying the good girl. So having a man—and a royal man at that—show up, richly reward a beautiful young woman, and then just leave again, is intriguing.

It’s worth noting that the illustration does not depict him as exactly a compelling candidate for matrimony, but there’s nothing in the actual text to describe his as the illustration shows:

(Also, why is this girl wearing, like, a toga, in a frozen field in Russia? Most of these illustrations feature this style of dress, and I have a very hard time believing that anyone was ever dressing like this in winter in Russia.)

Except, of course, we have to remember that this is a translated story, and we may be losing some nuance in English. So let’s do some further research.

The original Russian title is “Морозко,” which as far as I can tell just translates to “Frost.” But other English translations call the story “Father Frost.”

“Father” and “King” have completely different connotations in fairy tales. Father Someone is the weird old man you meet in the woods, who helps you in your quest. King Someone is the dashing man you marry and live happily ever after with. But neither “Father” nor “King” appears in the original Russian title. “Father” certainly makes more sense in this context, and I suspect there’s something in the Russian text itself, if not in the title, to support that translation.

I’d really like to know why the Yellow Fairy Book translated it as it did; I definitely spent more than half the story expecting the girl and the frost king to end up together, based largely on the title, with nothing in most of the text to contradict the idea. I would have gone into it with completely different expectations based on that one word difference in the title.

But the really noteworthy thing in this story, for me, is the dad. He makes me so angry. And usually anger is what drives me to make fairy tale blogs.

Mostly, now, we see absent fathers in our fairy tales. They remarried and then they died. They didn’t do anything wrong; they weren’t here for their daughters’ suffering.

We go back a little ways and we see passive fathers. They don’t interfere when their wives mistreat their daughters. Very bad parenting. We disapprove.

But this dad isn’t just not interfering. He’s actively participating in the murder of his daughter because his wife pressured him. It’s insane. We’re taking peer pressure to a whole new level here. The text makes it clear that he Does Not Want To Do This. But he does it anyway, because his wife told him to. We do not commit murders because our wives were firm with us! That will not hold up in court.

And this man faces exactly zero consequences. Presumably he profits off his daughter’s new wealth—we don’t get any information past the freezing of his stepdaughter. But he’s so awful! He should also have frozen to death! We don’t just excuse attempted murder because you didn’t really want to do it. Where are the consequences for his actions? I was hoping the daughter would be whisked away to a beautiful ice kingdom by the dashing frost king, but since he’s actually a frost father, this poor girl is stuck at home with her pathetic loser dad.

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Let's talk numbers!

 I will be ordering a crate of books which I will be signing and sending out from my house for the first orders; once I run out they will be mailed directly from the printer.

For When the War Ends, there are 16 books in a crate. (This varies based on page number.) One is going to be mine, since the proof copy I'm currently waiting on is for the last round of edits, and will get marked up a little.

So I'm thinking that the first 15 orders will include a bookmark? As like a special bonus?

If I am able to sell 20 books within the preorder period - well, actually by about 3/4ths of the way through, for shipping purposes - I can justify the expense of ordering a 2nd crate. In which case the first 25 books sold will include bookmarks, since they print in quantities of 25 at once.

So. If you want to order a copy of When the War Ends, while I'm happy to sell books any time, please consider buying during the preorder period, and if possible early in the preorder period, which is just the entire month of June.

I know a bookmark isn't anything, like, super exciting, but it's more exciting than just a signature on the title page, and it's something I can just slip into the book and not have to increase the shipping price because it no longer qualifies as media mail.

I have seven tentative designs - the difference is just in quotes included - and I'll put them up here for a vote. If I don't get a lot of feedback I'll also put it up for a vote on Tumblr. And maybe Instagram? You can do polls on Instagram, right?

Beauty and the Beast and Prejudice

 Look, it's not surprising that someone decided to make the Beast's curse a punishment for wickedness. If anything, it's a surprise that it took them 200 years to do it. We do, after all, see a precedent for characters being transformed as punishment; the new thing here was combining "enchanted bridegroom" with "rightful punishment."

This makes perfect sense as a direction to take the story in. What confuses me is that pretty much everyone in the last 70 years has continued to take the story in that exact same direction. After two entire centuries of Beauty and the Beast as a well-known and well-loved story, the entire point of it changed practically overnight, and no one ever looked back.

My theory is that there are two main reasons for this.

1. Our society equates beauty with goodness, and ugliness with wickedness, a pervasive and incorrect viewpoint that makes it hard for us to accept that someone as hideous, as monstrous, as the Beast did literally nothing wrong.

2. Our society struggles to grasp the concept of men as victims of violence, particularly violence perpetrated by women, particularly sexual violence. Men are tough and strong. Large, hairy, ugly men, especially. Men carry out violence. Men do not have violence inflicted upon them.

It's much easier for us to view the Beast as a villain in need of reform than as a prisoner in need of rescue, because that fits in better with our prejudices and preconceived notions. Shirley Temple said, "But what if the Beast was a little bit bad," and we grabbed it, and ran with it, because it makes more sense to us.

But it's not what happened. Granted, none of it happened; this is a fairy tale. But it's a fairy tale that holds a major place in our society, a fairy tale than everyone knows, that's been spread and shared in a thousand ways. And that our cultural awareness of the story has completely shifted, in a relatively brief period of time, says, I think, unfortunate things about us. We want the big ugly dude to be the bad guy. As soon as someone suggested he could be, we embraced it wholeheartedly and never looked back.

And, like, he doesn’t stay a bad guy. It’s a redemption story now. But the original Beast didn’t need to be redeemed! He needed to be rescued. Beauty needed to overcome her own prejudices so she was able to rescue him. We need to overcome ours so we can restore his reputation and his intended role in the story.

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The Witch and Her Servants

 This is an allegedly-Russian fairy tale which I read in The Yellow Fairy Book; I’ve had a bit of trouble tracking down any information about the story outside of Lang’s version, so I guess we’ll just have to trust him on this.

Once there was a king who had three sons and three special fruit trees. Alas, he has never eaten the fruit of any of these trees. If one unripe fruit is picked, everything on the trees rots, so it can’t be picked early. And every year, the night before the fruit is expected to ripen, all the fruit is stripped from all three trees.

His oldest son volunteers to guard the trees, but falls  asleep and fails to protect the fruit. Second son, the next year, same deal.

The third son, Iwanich, when his turn comes, doesn’t fall asleep. He catches a bird, which turns into a woman named Militza. She tells him that the seeds these trees were planted from were stolen from her mother, which caused her death. She promised her mother that she would steal their fruit each year so that no one could benefit from the stolen seeds.

Also, Militza was under a spell—presumably a turned-into-a-bird spell, which was broken by the force with which Iwanich grabbed her.

The two fall in love, but Militza can’t stay, because a witch once cut off a lock of her hair while she was sleeping, so now she’s under the witch’s power, and has to report back to her.

This poor girl has a lot going on.

She gives Iwanich a diamond to remember her by, which can also guide him to her kingdom if his really loves her and wants to find her.

The next morning, everyone is able to eat the fruit, and Iwanich lies about how he protected it. He takes some gold and a horse and leaves while everyone is celebrating.

He finds a creepy forest guarded by a tall, gaunt man, who advises him to avoid the forest, but Iwanich refuses, because the diamond ring says this is the way to go. The man gives him a bag of breadcrumbs and a live hare.

He uses the crumbs and the hare to distract all the wild animals that would otherwise have attacked them (RIP bunny).

Deeper in the forest, Iwanich meets a very short, prickly man with a very long beard, which he has used to tie up two lions. He accuses Iwanich of feeding his bodyguard? Which comes out of nowhere and is never explained. He didn’t feed the tall man at the other side of the forest. He did feed a lot of animals (RIP bunny, again), but I have literally no idea what this man is talking about.

He lends Iwanich one of his lions to thank him for this alleged bodyguard-feeding. This allows him to pass through the rest of the woods safely, and he leaves the lion at the edge as instructed.

Iwanich reaches a palace, at last, where he finds Militza, and they get married.

Bad news, guys. We’re only, like, halfway through this story.

Militza has to leave for a week to visit a relative. She tells Iwanich not to open a specific door while she’s gone.

So of course, he opens the door.

He finds a man being tortured, and gives him some water.

At which point the entire palace just vanishes, leaving Iwanich alone in a “desolate heath.”

He wanders around until he finds a little hut, occupied by the same tall man he met earlier, who invites him in, and suggests that he take a job with the local witch, Corva, since he mentions wanting to earn some money to get home.

It is unclear at this point whether “home” means his father’s kingdom or the currently-unknown location of his wife. It is also unclear whether he still has the magic wife-finding ring.

He gets a job taking care of Corva’s two horses—a mare and her foal. If he can keep track of them for a full year, she’ll give him anything he asks, but if either escapes him, she’ll kill him and put his head on a spike.

(There are a lot of heads on spikes at her house.)

He does well with the horses for quite a while, and during this time, happens to rescue a fish, and eagle, and a fox. It’s in the last three days of the year that things start going wrong.

The witch tells the horses to hide in the river. They do, and the fish collects them.

The witch tells the horses to hide in the sky. They do, and the eagle catches them.

The witch tells the horses to hide in the king’s henhouse. They do, and the fox catches them.

On the way home from the henhouse, the mare advises Iwanich to ask the witch for the foal as payment.

This—the whole hiding horses, life on the line, take the foal as payment deal—has come up several times now in the Yellow Fairy Book, though this is the first time the rest of the story has interested me enough to talk about. I think it must be a Russian story element; I don’t have a ton of previous experience with Russian folkore.

The witch gives him the foal. She also tells him that the man he found being tortured is a great magician, who has taken Militza captive. Iwanich is the only one who can kill him, and the magician has spies watching him constantly. When Iwanich finds him, he must not say a word to him, or he’ll fall under his power. He must take him by the beard and dash him to the ground.

(We get no explanation about the witch’s apparent knowledge of Iwanich’s backstory.)

He finds the magician, who greets him with the words “Thrice my fair benefactor!”

Iwanich takes him by the beard and throws him to the ground. The foal tramples him. He finds Militza and they live happily ever after.

It seems like something is missing here.

“Thrice my fair benefactor.” Okay. So one time was when Iwanich gave him water. I think the third time is right now, with the magician trying to play it like they’re friends? But that leaves one whole time unaccounted for.

The first time I read this I assumed that Torture Victim Magician was the short, prickly man with the lions, because the witch made note of the magician’s beard, but there’s actually no evidence of this—multiple people can have beards, and the illustrations clearly portray two separate men. Between “Thrice my fair benefactor” and “did you feed my bodyguard?” it seems like we’re missing some chunks of the story, or part of it was translated poorly, or something. And since I can’t find a version other than Lang’s, I have no way to investigate this further.

There is just so much going on in this story. Militza’s mother was killed by an evil magician, and she was turned into a bird by some unknown person, then she was under the power of a wicked witch—a problem which seems to have resolved itself by the time Iwanich finds her, because it never comes up again—and then another evil magician gets her. (Maybe they’re the same evil magician?) Iwanich just completely abandons his family, and he gets help from the tall guy, then the prickly guy, then the fish, eagle, and fox, and then the horses and the witch. It seems like we have multiple story’s worth of content here. Three or four villains? Maybe if you count Corva the horse witch? Three sets of helpers? This is all just a lot.

The major takeaway I have on this one is that Militza’s issue with this last evil magician is totally on her. Like, sure, she told Iwanich not to open the door, and he didn’t listen. But if your home contains a load-bearing torture victim, you need to disclose that to your husband. Generally, the people who hide torture victims in locked rooms are the bad guys. I would also have given him some water. And since he was BEING TORTURED, I don’t really blame him for going after Militza once he was free. This is what you get for torturing people.

 

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