Snow White and Rose Red
Read Snow White and Rose Red Online
Authors: Patricia Wrede
Table of Contents
"BEAR,” SAID THE WIDOW, “ART THOU OF FAERIE?”
Hugh hesitated, knowing that he could no longer truthfully make a claim, yet unsure if the Widow cared for such distinctions. He shook his head, then nodded and looked up at the Widow, hoping for understanding.
The Widow stared in complete incomprehension. Blanche looked at her mother, then back to Hugh and said gently, “Wast thou once of Faerie, but art no more?”
Gratefully, Hugh nodded. Blanche looked at her mother again, and the Widow nodded encouragingly. “Hast thou abandoned thy former home, then?” Blanche asked. Hugh shook his head in the negative. “Wast thou cast out?”
Again, Hugh nodded. Blanche hesitated. “Was it thine own faults which brought this banishment upon thee?”
Hugh shook his head emphatically. There was a moment’s silence. Then the Widow said, “Bear, is this thy true form?”
Hugh shut his eyes, wishing that bears could weep as men did, and shook his head again.
“Mother!” said Rosamund. “Meanest thou he is enchanted?”
FIREBIRD WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT™
FIREBIRD
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Tor, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 1989
Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009
Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
eISBN : 978-1-101-15943-9
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
This book is for Terri and Val,
because without them it would never have happened.
because without them it would never have happened.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is deeply grateful for the patient assistance of Cordelia Sherman and Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet in vetting the Elizabethan English in this book. Any egregious errors or deliberate idiocities which remain were committed by the author, and should be dealt with as such.
INTRODUCTION
by Terri Windling
Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for children only, this is a relatively modern idea. For thousands of years, fairy tales were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, and the earliest printed versions of the tales were published for adult readers.
In Europe, the earliest known fairy tale collections come from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy: Giovan Francesco Straparola’s
The Delectable Nights
and Giambattista Basile’s
The Tale of Tales.
These fairy tales were unabashedly sensuous, violent, and morally complex—so much so that Straparola had to defend his edition against charges of indecency from the Venetian Inquisition. In the tale of Sleeping Beauty, for instance, the princess is awakened not by a chaste kiss but by the birth of twins after the prince (who’s already married) has come and left again. In older versions of the Bluebeard narrative (such as the Italian story “Silvernose”), the heroine does not sit trembling while waiting for her brothers to rescue her; she outwits her captor, kills him, and restores the lives of her murdered predecessors. Cinderella doesn’t sit weeping in the cinders while talking blue-birds flutter around her; she is a clever, angry, feisty girl who seeks her own salvation—with the help of advice from her dead mother’s ghost, not the twinkle of fairy magic.
The Delectable Nights
and Giambattista Basile’s
The Tale of Tales.
These fairy tales were unabashedly sensuous, violent, and morally complex—so much so that Straparola had to defend his edition against charges of indecency from the Venetian Inquisition. In the tale of Sleeping Beauty, for instance, the princess is awakened not by a chaste kiss but by the birth of twins after the prince (who’s already married) has come and left again. In older versions of the Bluebeard narrative (such as the Italian story “Silvernose”), the heroine does not sit trembling while waiting for her brothers to rescue her; she outwits her captor, kills him, and restores the lives of her murdered predecessors. Cinderella doesn’t sit weeping in the cinders while talking blue-birds flutter around her; she is a clever, angry, feisty girl who seeks her own salvation—with the help of advice from her dead mother’s ghost, not the twinkle of fairy magic.
The name “fairy tale” itself comes from
conte de fée
, a term coined for a literary genre in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where popular writers such as Charles Perrault, Madame D‘Aulnoy, and Madame de Villenueve created and published fairy tales still known and enjoyed by readers today (though often in simplified forms): “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard,” “The White Cat,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and numerous others.
conte de fée
, a term coined for a literary genre in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where popular writers such as Charles Perrault, Madame D‘Aulnoy, and Madame de Villenueve created and published fairy tales still known and enjoyed by readers today (though often in simplified forms): “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Bluebeard,” “The White Cat,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and numerous others.
At the end of the eighteenth century, French fairy tales were widely published in German translations, becoming as popular with German readers as they’d long been in their own country. In the nineteenth century, German Romantic writers such as Ludwig Tieck and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came under the fairy tale spell and sought to create new fairy tale literature in the German language. A group of writers and scholars known as the Heidelberg Circle was particularly keen on establishing a homegrown German fairy tale tradition. This group included a pair of young folklore enthusiasts, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
The Brothers Grimm, of course, are now the two most famous men in the history of Western fairy tales, and their influence on fairy tale collecting and authorship around the world has been profound. It was during their university years that the brothers embarked on what was to become a lifelong labor: seeking out traditional German stories and collecting them into one volume that would stand as proof of the great folk culture unifying the German peoples. “Folklore” was a new area of scholarship, and the brothers were among the discipline’s most energetic pioneers. They weren’t interested in the literary confections of French and Italian fairy tale writers; they wanted stories from the oral tradition, the older and more distinctively German the better. Contrary to public perception, however, many of the stories eventually published in their famous collection of German folktales did not come straight from the mouths of German peasants. The Grimms gathered their tales largely from their circle of literate, middle-class friends—who had, in turn, first heard the stories from nursemaids and governesses, some of whom were French and who told tales clearly drawn from French and Italian literary sources. The Grimms then edited (and even rewrote) the stories prior to publication, toning them down and inserting clear morals reflecting their own Protestant values. So these too, in a sense, are literary fairy tales—rooted in the oral tradition but shaped by the pens of the Brothers Grimm.
The fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red” provides an interesting example, for it doesn’t seem to exist in the German oral tradition prior to its appearance in the Brothers Grimm collection. As far as scholars can tell, Wilhelm Grimm adapted the tale from a story called “The Ungrateful Dwarf” by Caroline Stahl, published in 1818. Both Stahl’s story and Wilhelm Grimm’s adaptation use elements from the “Animal Bridegroom” tradition (folk stories in which girls marry bears, snakes, and other beasts) but diverge markedly from the usual range of “Animal Bridegroom” plots. Thus the fairy tale, as we know it, is actually a literary creation by Grimm (borrowing heavily from Stahl) and not a folktale passed through the centuries from storyteller to storyteller.
Does this mean it’s not a “proper” fairy tale? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer, for all of the tales we know and love today tend to contain a blend of oral and literary influences, in varying proportions. Some of our most beloved tales started life as literary publications (“Beauty and the Beast,” for example) and turned into oral stories later. Fairy tales have a way of passing in and out of the oral tradition, marked by many hands. Whatever the origins of “Snow White and Rose Red,” what’s certain is that it’s
now
part of the fairy tale canon, told and retold by storytellers all around the world.
now
part of the fairy tale canon, told and retold by storytellers all around the world.
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