Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales Read online

  Angela Carter’s

  BOOK OF FAIRY

  TALES

  Angela Carter’s

  BOOK OF FAIRY

  TALES

  Edited by Angela Carter

  Illustrated by Corinna Sargood

  VIRAGO

  This edition first published in Great Britain in November 2005 by Virago Press

  First published in two editions as:

  The Virago Book of Fairy Tales Collection, Introduction and

  Notes © Angela Carter 1990

  Illustrations © Corinna Sargood 1990

  The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales Collection © The estate of Angela Carter 1992

  Illustrations © Corinna Sargood 1992

  Afterword © Marina Warner 1992

  Copyright © The estate of Angela Carter 2005

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 34900 821 9

  Constable

  is an imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales brings together two collections of fairy tales that Angela Carter edited, which were published as The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992).

  About a month before she died in February 1992, Angela Carter was in the Brompton Hospital in London. The manuscript of the second collection lay on her bed. ‘I’m just finishing this off for the girls,’ she said. Her loyalty to us was boundless. When we first heard she was ill, we told her not to worry, we had published The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, that was enough. But no, Angela claimed it was just the project for an ailing writer to pursue. And so she worked on the book until a few weeks before her death. Though she had collected all the stories, and had grouped them under her chosen headings, she had not yet written an introduction and was unable to finish the notes. Shahrukh Husain, editor of The Virago Book of Witches, was able to draw on her own extensive knowledge of folklore and fairy tales to complete the notes including remarks and notes from Angela Carter’s own files wherever they were left.

  For this new edition we have printed the introduction Angela Carter provided for The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Marina Warner wrote an appreciation of Angela Carter after she died. Published originally as the Introduction to the The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, it appears now as an Afterword.

  Lennie Goodings

  Publisher, Virago

  CONTENTS

  Publisher’s Note

  Introduction

  Sermerssuaq

  1. BRAVE, BOLD AND WILFUL

  The Search for Luck

  Mr Fox

  Kakuarshuk

  The Promise

  Kate Crackernuts

  The Fisher-Girl and the Crab

  2. CLEVER WOMEN, RESOURCEFUL GIRLS AND DESPERATE STRATAGEMS

  Maol a Chliobain

  The Wise Little Girl

  Blubber Boy

  The Girl Who Stayed in the Fork of a Tree

  The Princess in the Suit of Leather

  The Hare

  Mossycoat

  Vasilisa the Priest’s Daughter

  The Pupil

  The Rich Farmer’s Wife

  Keep Your Secrets

  The Three Measures of Salt

  The Resourceful Wife

  Aunt Kate’s Goomer-Dust

  The Battle of the Birds

  Parsley-girl

  Clever Gretel

  The Furburger

  3. SILLIES

  A Pottle o’ Brains

  Young Man in the Morning

  Now I Should Laugh, If I Were Not Dead

  The Three Sillies

  The Boy Who Had Never Seen Women

  The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle

  Tom Tit Tot

  The Husband Who Was to Mind the House

  4. GOOD GIRLS AND WHERE IT GETS THEM

  East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon

  The Good Girl and the Ornery Girl

  The Armless Maiden

  5. WITCHES

  The Chinese Princess

  The Cat-Witch

  The Baba Yaga

  Mrs Number Three

  6. UNHAPPY FAMILIES

  The Girl Who Banished Seven Youths

  The Market of the Dead

  The Woman Who Married Her Son’s Wife

  The Little Red Fish and the Clog of Gold

  The Wicked Stepmother

  Tuglik and Her Granddaughter

  The Juniper Tree

  Nourie Hadig

  Beauty and Pock Face

  Old Age

  7. MORAL TALES

  Little Red Riding Hood

  Feet Water

  Wives Cure Boastfulness

  Tongue Meat

  The Woodcutter’s Wealthy Sister

  Escaping Slowly

  Nature’s Ways

  The Two Women Who Found Freedom

  How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales

  8. STRONG MINDS AND LOW CUNNING

  The Twelve Wild Ducks

  Old Foster

  Šāhīn

  The Dog’s Snout People

  The Old Woman Against the Stream

  The Letter Trick

  Rolando and Brunilde

  The Greenish Bird

  The Crafty Woman

  9. UP TO SOMETHING – BLACK ARTS AND DIRTY TRICKS

  Pretty Maid Ibronka

  Enchanter and Enchantress

  The Telltale Lilac Bush

  Tatterhood

  The Witchball

  The Werefox

  The Witches’ Piper

  Vasilissa the Fair

  The Midwife and the Frog

  10. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

  Fair, Brown and Trembling

  Diirawic and Her Incestuous Brother

  The Mirror

  The Frog Maiden

  The Sleeping Prince

  The Orphan

  11. MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

  Achol and Her Wild Mother

  Tunjur, Tunjur

  The Little Old Woman with Five Cows

  Achol and Her Adoptive Lioness-Mother

  12. MARRIED WOMEN

  Story of a Bird Woman

  Father and Mother Both ‘Fast’

  Reason to Beat Your Wife

  The Three Lovers

  The Seven Leavenings

  The Untrue Wife’s Song

  The Woman Who Married Her Son

  Duang and His Wild Wife

  A Stroke of Luck

  The Beans in the Quart Jar

  13. USEFUL STORIES

  A Fable of a Bird and Her Chicks

  The Three Aunts

  Tale of an Old Woman

  The Height of Purple Passion

  Salt, Sauce and Spice, Onion Leaves, Pepp
er and Drippings

  Two Sisters and the Boa

  Spreading the Fingers

  Afterword by Marina Warner

  Notes on Parts 1–7 by Angela Carter

  Notes on Parts 8–13 by Angela Carter and Shahrukh Husain

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  lthough this is called a book of fairy tales, you will find very few actual fairies within the following pages. Talking beasts, yes; beings that are, to a greater or lesser extent, supernatural; and many sequences of events that bend, somewhat, the laws of physics. But fairies, as such, are thin on the ground, for the term ‘fairy tale’ is a figure of speech and we use it loosely, to describe the great mass of infinitely various narrative that was, once upon a time and still is, sometimes, passed on and disseminated through the world by word of mouth – stories without known originators that can be remade again and again by every person who tells them, the perennially refreshed entertainment of the poor.

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most poor Europeans were illiterate or semi-literate and most Europeans were poor. As recently as 1931, 20 per cent of Italian adults could neither read nor write; in the South, as many as 40 per cent. The affluence of the West has only recently been acquired. Much of Africa, Latin America and Asia remains poorer than ever, and there are still languages that do not yet exist in any written form or, like Somali, have acquired a written form only in the immediate past. Yet Somali possesses a literature no less glorious for having existed in the memory and the mouth for the greater part of its history, and its translation into written forms will inevitably change the whole nature of that literature, because speaking is public activity and reading is private activity. For most of human history, ‘literature’, both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written – heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.

  For the last two or three hundred years, fairy stories and folk tales have been recorded for their own sakes, cherished for a wide variety of reasons, from antiquarianism to ideology. Writing them down – and especially printing them – both preserves, and also inexorably changes, these stories. I’ve gathered together some stories from published sources for this book. They are part of a continuity with a past that is in many respects now alien to us, and becoming more so day by day. ‘Drive a horse and plough over the bones of the dead,’ said William Blake. When I was a girl, I thought that everything Blake said was holy, but now I am older and have seen more of life, I treat his aphorisms with the affectionate scepticism appropriate to the exhortations of a man who claimed to have seen a fairy’s funeral. The dead know something we don’t, although they keep it to themselves. As the past becomes more and more unlike the present, and as it recedes even more quickly in developing countries than it does in the advanced, industrialized ones, more and more we need to know who we were in greater and greater detail in order to be able to surmise what we might be.

  The history, sociology and psychology transmitted to us by fairy tales is unofficial – they pay even less attention to national and international affairs than do the novels of Jane Austen. They are also anonymous and genderless. We may know the name and gender of the particular individual who tells a particular story, just because the collector noted the name down, but we can never know the name of the person who invented that story in the first place. Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’

  The chances are, the story was put together in the form we have it, more or less, out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away, and has been tinkered with, had bits added to it, lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories, until our informant herself has tailored the story personally, to suit an audience of, say, children, or drunks at a wedding, or bawdy old ladies, or mourners at a wake – or, simply, to suit herself.

  I say ‘she’, because there exists a European convention of an archetypal female storyteller, ‘Mother Goose’ in English, ‘Ma Mère l’Oie’ in French, an old woman sitting by the fireside, spinning – literally ‘spinning a yarn’ as she is pictured in one of the first self-conscious collections of European fairy tales, that assembled by Charles Perrault and published in Paris in 1697 under the title Histoires ou contes du temps passé, translated into English in 1729 as Histories or Tales of Past Times. (Even in those days there was already a sense among the educated classes that popular culture belonged to the past – even, perhaps, that it ought to belong to the past, where it posed no threat, and I am saddened to discover that I subscribe to this feeling, too; but this time, it just might be true.)

  Obviously, it was Mother Goose who invented all the ‘old wives’ tales’, even if old wives of any sex can participate in this endless recycling process, when anyone can pick up a tale and make it over. Old wives’ tales – that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.

  Nevertheless, it is certainly a characteristic of the fairy tale that it does not strive officiously after the willing suspension of disbelief in the manner of the nineteenth-century novel. ‘In most languages, the word “tale” is a synonym for “lie” or “falsehood”,’ according to Vladimir Propp. ‘“The tale is over; I can’t lie any more” – thus do Russian narrators conclude their stories.’

  Other storytellers are less emphatic. The English gypsy who narrated ‘Mossycoat’ said he’d played the fiddle at Mossycoat’s son’s twenty-first birthday party. But this is not the creation of verisimilitude in the same way that George Eliot does it; it is a verbal flourish, a formula. Every person who tells that story probably added exactly the same little touch. At the end of ‘The Armless Maiden’ the narrator says: ‘I was there and drank mead and wine; it ran down my mustache, but did not go into my mouth.’ Very likely.

  Although the content of the fairy tale may record the real lives of the anonymous poor with sometimes uncomfortable fidelity – the poverty, the hunger, the shaky family relationships, the all-pervasive cruelty and also, sometimes, the good humour, the vigour, the straightforward consolations of a warm fire and a full belly – the form of the fairy tale is not usually constructed so as to invite the audience to share a sense of lived experience. The ‘old wives’ tale’ positively parades its lack of verisimilitude. ‘There was and there was not, there was a boy,’ is one of the formulaic beginnings favoured by Armenian storytellers. The Armenian variant of the enigmatic ‘Once upon a time’ of the English and French fairy tale is both utterly precise and absolutely mysterious: ‘There was a time and no time . . .’

  When we hear the formula ‘Once upon a time’, or any of its variants, we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. Mother Goose may tell lies, but she isn’t going to deceive you in that way. She is going to entertain you, to help you pass the time pleasurably, one of the most ancient and honourable functions of art. At the end of the story, the Armenian storyteller says: ‘From the sky fell three apples, one to me, one to the storyteller, and one to the person who entertained you.’ Fairy tales are dedicated to the pleasure principle, although since there is no such thing as pure pleasure, there is always more going on than meets the eye.

  We say to fibbing children: ‘Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it. Often, as with the untruths of children, we are invited to admire invention for its own sake. ‘Chance is the mother of invention,’ observed Lawrence Millman i
n the Arctic, surveying a roistering narrative inventiveness. ‘Invention’, he adds, ‘is also the mother of invention.’

  These stories are continually surprising:

  So one woman after another straightway brought forth her child.

  Soon there was a whole row of them.

  Then the whole band departed, making a confused noise. When the girl saw that, she said: ‘There is no joke about it now.

  There comes a red army with the umbilical cords still hanging on.’

  Like that.

  ‘“Little lady, little lady,” said the boys, “little Alexandra, listen to the watch, tick tick tick: mother in the room all decked in gold.”’

  And that.

  ‘The wind blew high, my heart did ache,

  To see the hole the fox did make.’

  And that.

  This is a collection of old wives’ tales, put together with the intention of giving pleasure, and with a good deal of pleasure on my own part. These stories have only one thing in common – they all centre around a female protagonist; be she clever, or brave, or good, or silly, or cruel, or sinister, or awesomely unfortunate, she is centre stage, as large as life – sometimes, like Sermerssuaq, larger.

  Considering that, numerically, women have always existed in this world in at least as great numbers as men and bear at least an equal part in the transmission of oral culture, they occupy centre stage less often than you might think. Questions of the class and gender of the collector occur here; expectations, embarrassment, the desire to please. Even so, when women tell stories they do not always feel impelled to make themselves heroines and are also perfectly capable of telling tales that are downright unsisterly in their attitudes – for example, the little story about the old lady and the indifferent young man. The conspicuously vigorous heroines Lawrence Millman discovered in the Arctic are described by men as often as they are by women and their aggression, authority and sexual assertiveness probably have societal origins rather than the desire of an Arctic Mother Goose to give assertive role models.

  Susie Hoogasian-Villa noted with surprise how her women informants among the Armenian community in Detroit, Michigan, USA, told stories about themselves that ‘poke fun at women as being ridiculous and second-best’. These women originally came from resolutely patriarchal village communities and inevitably absorbed and recapitulated the values of those communities, where a new bride ‘could speak to no one except the children in the absence of the men and elder women. She could speak to her husband in privacy.’ Only the most profound social changes could alter the relations in these communities, and the stories women told could not in any way materially alter their conditions.