More favorite fairy tales....

I think I've posted a time or ten before on this blog that I'm a fan of fairy tales. Picture books, modern-day adaptations, young adult versions, I love them all.

I've also posted a few times about my favorite fairy tales: Beauty and the Beast; East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon; Tam Lin. All three are extremely popular right now and there are many adaptations of each currently available.

I'd like to mention three fairy tale-like books that aren't quite as well known. All are beloved favorites with me, and my copies are beginning to show wear and tear from having been reread so many times.

The Ordinary Princess
by M. M. Kaye



I first read this as a child. It was out of print at the time and my copy was a battered library book that looked like it had been run over by a tank. Still, I was enthralled. The heroine was a princess, the seventh daughter born to a king (said to be very lucky--a nice change from the usual attitude towards daughters in fairy tales) and given the fantastic name of Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne. All the fairies in the kingdom come to give Princess Amy their blessings. The last, fed up with the other fairies' extravagant gifts, says "You shall be ordinary!" And so she is. Princess Amy grows up plain, untalented, snub-nosed and freckled. Eventually she runs away from home and tries to live the life of an ordinary girl.

I won't give the ending away, but as a child I found it very satisfying and enjoyable, and that hasn't changed in adulthood. The book's been reprinted since and my copy is a handsome hardcover version with the author's original illustrations. M. M. Kaye is more famous for her novels for adults: specifically The Far Pavillions and Shadows of the Moon (one of my personal favorites), but this charming, sweet, old-fashioned story for children shouldn't be overlooked. It has a wonderful message in that the hero falls in love with the princess not because she's a princess, and not because she's beautiful (because she isn't, and there's no miraculous bestowing of beauty later on), but because she's a good, decent person. This is definitely something that will be read to my children someday.

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons
by Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy



I came across a small paperback of this title while working at the bookstore in high school. It's one of the rare Middle Eastern stories on the market right now and is based on an Iraqi folktale from the 11th century. The heroine is Buran, the middle of seven daughters. Her father is mocked for having no sons and no money to dower his daughters. His brother, on the other hand, has seven sons and a thriving business. When the brother refuses to help out, or to marry his sons off to their cousins, Buran makes a momentous decision. She will disguise herself as a boy and leave to seek her family's fortune.

Buran is a very appealing heroine. She is smart and courageous and doesn't let her status as an "inferior" girl keep her from helping her family. In the course of the story, she builds up a trading empire, amasses a fortune for her family, and even wins the heart of the prince of the land. She also manages to enact a satisfying and bloodless revenge on her heartless uncle and arrogant cousins. There's enough of a Middle-Eastern flavor to this story for it to feel like something out of The Thousand and One Nights, but it's still accessible and enjoyable for Western readers.

The Blue Castle
by L. M. Montgomery



This title is a newer favorite. Back when I was in college but still living at home, I used to make a weekly circuit of all the thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul) for used books, often-times picking up paperbacks for ten cents each. One such book was The Blue Castle. I adore L. M. Montgomery's famous Anne books and decided to give The Blue Castle, one of her few titles for adults, a try. Naturally, the paperback sat on my bookshelf (or more probably, in a stack of "to be read" books on the floor) for years. It wasn't until I was packing for one of our many moves that I thought about the book again. I was sitting on the floor and putting books into boxes when I came across it. I was trying to decide to keep it or get rid of it, so I decided to give the first few pages a try.

Several hours later, long after I'd lost feeling in my legs, I finished the book. And packed it most decisively in the keeper box. It's the story of Valancy Stirling, a 29-year-old spinster living with her oppressive family in Edwardian-era Canada. Valancy is deeply unhappy with her life and spends her time daydreaming of a blue castle and the handsome man who will love her. When she hears from her doctor that she has less than a year to live, Valancy makes the momentous decision to leave home and try to find what happiness she can. She ends up living in a cabin in the woods with the reclusive Barney Snaith (yes, an awful name), and elements of Bluebeard's Chamber are woven into the story before it reaches a satisfying, fairy-tale-ish conclusion.

There are certainly many more fairy tales for children, young adults, and adults out there, and just because the genre is typically associated with children doesn't mean it should be overlooked by adults. All three of the books above are as entertaining and ultimately comforting to me now as they were when first I read them.

"Oh, I forbid ye maidens all / that wear gold in your hair..."

"Oh I forbid ye maidens all
That wear gold in your hair--
Do not go by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there!"

Until the age of eleven or twelve, I had only a passing interest and fondness for fairy tales. I enjoyed reading them, but they weren't a driving passion for me. That all changed when my older sister came home for a visit from college and made my family watch the marvelous film Labyrinth. Suddenly, I was obsessed.

Since that moment, I've actively sought out folk and fairy tale adaptations, both those that are still in their classic form, and those that have crossed into the genre of fantasy and sci-fi. If they at all have anything to do with fairy tales, folk tales, old ballads, and so on, I usually love them.

My three favorite tales/ballads are Beauty and the Beast (French), East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon (Norse), and Tam Lin (Scottish). Tam Lin is a Scottish ballad that dates back to the 1600s. The earliest extant recording of it is from the 1800s, and has been studied in depth at this website, which offers the following summary:

The woods of Carterhaugh are guarded by Tam Lin, a man who demands payment of all maidens who pass through, in the form of a belonging or their virginity. A maiden named Janet travels to Carterhaugh and picks a rose, causing Tam Lin to appear. He questions her presence, to which she relies that Carterhaugh is rightfully hers. She then travels to her father's house where she exhibits the early signs of pregnancy, much to the concern of the household. She states that her lover is elven, and then returns to Carterhaugh, once again encountering Tam Lin. He reveals he is not elven, but a mortal captured by the queen of Faeries, and that he may be sacrificied to hell as part of the faerie tithe. He then details how she can save him to be her mate, if she will undergo a trial on Halloween night. She must pull him from his horse as the faeries process through the woods, and hold onto him as he is transformed into various beasts, then plunge him into a well when he turns into a brand of fire. When he regains his own naked shape she must cover him with her green mantle and he will be free. She does all of this, much to the anger of the watching Queen of faeries.

That's a rough summary---the ballad in its entirety is much more complex and subtle, but most adaptations of this story follow it to some extent.

One day in 12th grade, while I was waiting at the local library for my ride home, I browsed through the children's picture books and came across Jane Yolen's Tam Lin:



It's a charming enough picture book and the illustrations are beautiful, so a copy made its eventual way into my permanent collection. However, by dint of being a picture book meant for small children, the essence of the story was dumbed down quite a bit and what was left wasn't much at all. I enjoy that picture book, but there's not much to it. I gradually forgot the story.

At the age of 21 I was living in Honolulu and attending the University of Hawaii, and since I hadn't been able to bring many of my own books to school, I was visiting the local library fairly often. One of the books I checked out was An Earthly Knight, by Janet McNaughton:



As I began to read this story, first with cautious interest and later with rapt absorption, elements of the tale started to ring with familiarity. I had a "Zut alors!" moment and realized this was a retelling of Tam Lin, and as I finished it up, I realized I wanted to learn more about it. That started off a fascinating few months of researching the ballad and finding out about other retellings, and there was a wealth of information and recommendations online.

The next version I read was Pamela Dean's seminal Tam Lin, part of DAW Fantasy's Fairy Tale Series, in which popular modern Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors retold their favorite fairy tales:



This version is my favorite. It sets the story in the 1970s at a small private college in Minnesota. The characters are all students or professors studying English and the classics, and the book is enjoyably chock-full of literary references, quotations, and allusions (Shakespeare! Milton! Homer! Keats!). The author wrote the story as a love letter of sorts to her time at college and intertwined it with the ballad to great effect.

By the time I finished reading it, I had a list a mile long of books to look up and find, thanks to the name dropping of the characters and Pamela Dean's list of Recommended Reading at the end of the novel (I LOVE THOSE). In the process of tracking those books down, I came across Dianne Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock:



Fire and Hemlock is a less literal interpetation of the story, but one that is also full of literary references and allusions. The young heroine, Polly, discovers she has two sets of memories about the same time period of her life, and the only thing in common between them is the mysterious Tom Lynne. Using her knowledge of the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, as well as that of comparative religon, Polly must figure out the truth of her memories and rescue Tom.

The most recent adaptation I've read is Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I picked up last week while Amanda and Rachel were visiting:



This is a book I'd heard about for many years but never gotten around to reading, and halfway through it I began calling myself every kind of idiot. It was WONDERFUL! The author very skillfully wove the basic story of the ballad into a detail-rich plot set in the Elizabethan period. The heroine, Katherine Sutton, is banished from Queen Mary's court and sent into exile in the countryside, where she discovers a mystery surrounding her guardian's deceased daughter, and his silent, haunted brother.

I have two books left to read in my Tam Lin reading questm and then I'll have run out:



Patricia A. McKillip is a very highly regarded author of young adult fantasy--her An Alphabet of Thorn pretty much blew my mind and left me wandering around like a dazed idiot afterwards. She's doing an author reading and autograph session at Powell's next month and I'd love to go, but it's while I'm going to be in Hawaii. Curses!



I'm not familiar with Annie Dalton at all, and this seems to be one of the more obscure retellings. It got very high reviews online, however, and those were enough for me to track down a battered, used paperback from Powell's. I'll give it a try as soon as I've finished the eighteen hundred other books I'm right in the middle of.

By no means have I exhausted every retelling of this ballad. The website I linked to above lists dozens more, but most are either out of print or else they don't appeal to me for one reason or another (i.e., I can't read a picture book if I don't like the art, no way no how). So for the moment, I've come to an impasse in my quest to explore Tam Lin.