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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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.

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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.

 

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