The Magic Carpet Flight Manual

**addition to post: the programme is now available to listen to online or download here**

The name of this programme alone makes me want to listen to it. The Magic Carpet Flight Manual will air online and on the BBC World Service this Friday (times here):

Web-dreaming one day, writer Cathy FitzGerald stumbled on a site belonging to a museum in Iran. It purported to tell the "true history" of the flying carpet and detailed its many uses – military, as a means of aerial attack; commercial, as a vehicle for the transport of goods; and cultural, as a device to help readers in the library at Alexandria reach the high books. The article appeared across the web, rarely with any caveat or credit.

In search of a "real" flying carpet, Cathy tracks down the article's author, Azhar Abidi, who helps her separate carpet fiction from carpet fact. She goes on to meet a physicist working on levitation in the quantum world, and a Japanese astronaut who took a carpet ride in space.

Cathy FitzGerald explores the past, present, and future of the magic carpet and wonders what our desire to defy gravity tells us about ourselves.

from the BBC website

I love the term 'web-dreaming', it sounds so much more inspirational and productive than the haphazard, frantic click-throughs I too often indulge in. Web-hunting, web-scrounging, web-sifting, web-tunnelling all come more easily to my mind, but from now on I will only web-dream. Funnily enough I came across the peculiar museum website mentioned a while ago whilst researching magic carpets for a previous carpet post.

The author of the fictional history of the carpet Azhar Abidi is a writer, born and raised in Pakistan, who now lives in Australia (thanks to Matt at Books and Adventures for the link to his blog). Marina Warner has also been interviewed for the programme and her fascinating podcast on magic carpets, which is well worth listening to, is still available online here.

Photograph by churl CC license: some rights reserved.

Dresses in fairy tales

I have been thinking a lot about dresses recently because I've been commissioned by Lancaster Literature Festival to write a contemporary fairy tale featuring a dress made from the pages of old books. The dress itself is being made by designer and dressmaker Jennifer Pritchard Couchman, it will be exhibited throughout the festival and I get to wear it to read the story(!).

When I first started pulling together ideas for the tale I couldn't get the Disney Cinderella ball gown out of my head, which bothered me. A lot. I'm not a fan of the Disney versions of fairy tales, or of clothes worship or fashion in general. For the past four years I've spent most days dressed in scruffs accessorised with baby sick, snot, paint and porridge (in various combinations) and not been that bothered about it. But I can't deny the power of a beautiful dress.

Disney Princess culture may be malign, with its sparkly nylon tentacles gripped round the world's little girls (and their parents' credit cards), but Disney didn't invent the idea of the fairy tale dress as a garment of transformation. In the Perrault version of Cinderella, from 1697, Cinderella actually gets to wear two dresses to two balls, and after having her 'nasty rags' transformed into clothes made of 'cloth of gold and silver, all beset with jewels' by her godmother she silences the ballroom with her beauty and the King's son falls for her on first sight. (For an excellent dissection of the problems with this version, and the multitude of versions it's inspired, and a look at some more positive Ash Girl heroines I'd recommend Terri Windling's excellent essay Cinderella: Ashes, Blood, and the Slipper of Glass.)

In the Grimms' version of the tale the maltreated Ashenputtel gets to go to three dances and wear three dresses, each more magnificent than the last. There is no godmother but instead a little white bird, which brings the dresses when Ashenputtel makes a wish beneath the hazel tree she has planted on her mother's grave. And we're told 'when she went to the festival in the dress, no one knew how to speak for astonishment'.

In fairy tales spectacular dresses aren't only a magic ticket to get you into a ball, they can also be an important tool for bargaining with. In The Singing, Springing Lark the heroine finds her husband (who used to be a dove who used to be a lion who was really a prince) is about to be married to another woman, a princess (who used to be a dragon). She uses a dress given to her by the sun and 'as brilliant as the sun itself' to get a night with her lost husband...

The dress pleased the bride so well that she thought it might do for her wedding-dress, and asked if it was for sale? "Not for money or land," answered she, "but for flesh and blood." The bride asked her what she meant by that, so she said, "Let me sleep a night in the chamber where the bridegroom sleeps."

In Donkeyskin the beleaguered princess whose father wants to marry her is advised by her godmother to ask for a dress that can't be made. So she tells him she can't give him an answer until he has presented her with a dress that matches the sky, and when (after much coersion) he manages to get her a dress which looks 'as if it had been cut straight out of the heavens' she asks next for a dress of moonbeams and then one of sunshine. Each impossible dress is brought to her and it is instead the skin of an ass which affords her escape from the situation. Although, of course, the beautiful dresses come in handy for the happy ending.

Donkeyskin's fantastical sky dresses bring to my mind Max Lüthi's comments on dresses in fairy tales in Once Upon a Time On the Nature of Fairy Tales:

And in another Greek fairy tale, a fig, a nut, and a hazelnut each contain a dress. On one “the month of May could be seen with its flowers”; on the second “the heavens could be seen with its stars”: and on the third “the sea could be seen with its waves.” One cannot express more beautifully how the world is woven into the clothing of man in the fairy tale, how the enormous patterns of the cosmos are connected with man in a manageable and beneficial form, and how man is securely established in the realm of heaven and earth, and assimilates them both.

Whilst I've been writing my tale featuring dresses for the festival, I've collected together all kinds of dress links and other bits and bobs in an online scrapbook to inspire me. And I've discovered the taste for impossible dresses isn't confined to fairy tales, there have been real fads for dresses made of glass and of paper, there have been dresses made of chocolate and even hair.

The story I read will just be one of the fairy tale elements of the festival. Carol Ann Duffy will be reading her fairy tale The Princess' Blankets, Ali Shaw will be reading from his haunting novel The Girl with the Glass Feet, and Sara Maitland, author of many fairy tales, will be reading as part of the Great Short Fiction Day. And storyteller Dominic Kelly will be sharing Mossycoat with under 5s and their grown ups. And that's all just a fraction of what's going on in the wider festival which runs from the 15th to the 24th October. The full brochure is available here.


Both of the illustrations in this post are of the Grimms' tale Ashenputtel, the first by Arthur Rackham and the second by Elenore Abbott.

Quick Link: Fairy Tale Reflections

YA fantasy author Katherine Langrish, writer of excellent folklore inspired fiction and the lovely children's literature blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, has launched a series of Friday fairy tale posts today with her reflections on The Juniper Tree. You can read her insightful thoughts on the tale here. And on forthcoming Fridays she will be hosting guest posts by other well-known fantasy writers about fairy tales. Definitely one to follow!

New Fairy Tales - call for submissions

We are now inviting submissions for our sixth issue. You can find the full submission guidelines here. The deadline is the 20th October and the issue is due out at the end of November. Looking forward to reading your tales!

The beautiful picture above is by our very lovely art director Faye Durston.

Into the forest...

This is one of those times I desperately wish I had a mossycoat I could put on to travel across country in an instant. Deloitte Ignite 2010 is an amazing looking three day festival of contemporary arts taking place at the Royal Opera House in London this weekend. It is being curated by Joanna MacGregor and the theme is forests. Here are a few snippets from their website to tempt you (or torment you—I'm sorry about that):

For the 2010 festival Joanna has taken her inspiration from forests: forests as a place of quiet, reflective beauty, mystery and discovery, as places of fairytale narrative, as well as metaphorical spaces. She has invited artists to create forests all over the Royal Opera House in different materials: recycled and reclaimed wood, organic materials, old costumes and mannequins, shimmering projections and reflecting pools. There are films, music and dance performances, soundscapes and installations.

Fairy tale highlights include:

Into the Woods: a cinema – unlike any you have visited – will occupy the Clore Studio Upstairs, as distinguished writer and cultural historian Marina Warner introduces and discusses a programme of fairytale-inspired films. The delicious little Russian-language animations Kuygorozh and Little Vasilisa (2007) partner the darker worlds of Joan Ashworth’s How Mermaids Breed (2002) and Alice Anderson’s The Night I Became a Doll (2009).

The German silhouette animator and film director Lotte Reiniger’s magnificently opulent and imaginative The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) was only discovered and reconstructed in the last few years, and is considered the world’s oldest-surviving feature length animation. Over the weekend it receives four screenings, with a wonderful contemporary score composed and performed live by WARP artist Mira Calix. Reiniger’s better known Fairytales – brief, endearing animations from 1922 – form the basis and backdrop of scorching performances from the Rumanian violinist Alexander Balanescu and Russian accordionist and singer Evelina Petrova, combining the brilliant virtuosity of improvisation with raw, aching qualities of Russian folk music and singing.

There are many more intriguing and tantalising descriptions of events and installations to explore on the website. I'd really recommend clicking though. And if you can get there, book and go and come back and tell us what it was like—the daytime events are free!

Because I will, unfortunately, be nowhere near London, or even a forest, this weekend I thought I would take solace in a couple of my favourite forest links. They are both from the treasure chest that is the JOMA archives: Into the Woods: On British Forests, Myth and Now is an interesting exploration of forests by poet Ruth Padel. The Green Man & the Green Woman: Art Inspired by Forest Myths features a fascinating essay by Terri Windling and is accompanied by beautiful artwork from Windling, Charles Vess, Alan Lee, the Frouds and others.


Photo by Graham Dean, used with permission.

The tales of William Palmer

What if all the myths and folktales of these islands were true? And what if they were not only true but present now in our world? All the spirits, existing, as they have always existed, in the gaps between tower blocks, in the shadows under bridges, in the corner of our vision...
(from the Pilgrim programme info)

Stepping slightly off the crooked path of fairy tales and into the undergrowth of folklore that sprawls alongside, I wanted to let you know about Pilgrim, a wonderful series of BBC Radio 4 plays by Sebastian Baczkiewicz inspired by the folklore of the British Isles.

William Palmer is 900 years old—he was cursed by a fellow pilgrim on the road to Canterbury in 1185 for claiming that Christianity would wipe out the old beliefs. That pilgrim was the Lord of Faerie and William must forever walk between the worlds of the Greyfolk (them) and the Hotbloods (us). Pilgrim is a delightful—and frequently chilling—mix of tales old and new. The second series started today with The Drowned Church, and it's available to listen to online for the next seven days. There's also an interesting 'making of' blog post here. It's a series not to be missed!


Photo by Steve Bowbrick CC license: some rights reserved.

On Anti-Tales

Robert Powell, Lance, 2008, watercolour etching

...most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode...
—Angela Carter, 1983

My two favourite things about going to conferences are meeting fascinating people, and returning with a notebook stuffed with names and links and titles and doodles—all of things I desperately want to find out more about. The Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment Symposium was no exception. It always takes me a while to unpack when I've been away (over a week later my rucksack still has things in it) but I thought I'd unpack my notebook a little bit here, and share some of the things I got a tantalising taste of and want to follow up on.

Over the course of two days there were 23 papers, 2 plenaries, an artist's talk and 3 fiction readings given. Researchers came from a range of disciplines and from universities around the world. Happily many of the papers given will be collected together and published by Cambridge Scholars publishing in 2011. I can't possibly do justice to everything that went on, so I'm not going to attempt to. I do hope the following links may be of some use though...

(apologies that this is in no particular order, and messy, like my notebook)

Tales and books I now want to read:

• After hearing about Nalo Hopkinson's reimagining of Bluebeard in a postcolonial setting 'The Glass Bottle Trick', in a paper by Natalie Robinson, I really want to get my hands on Hopkinson's collection Skin Folk.

• One of my favourite papers was Dr Jessica Tiffin's exploration of the vampiric versions of Snow White by Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee, and of the unusual interplay between the gothic and fairy tale elements in these tales. I now really want to read Tiffin's examination of narrative and metafiction in modern fairy tale Marvelous Geometry.

• 'A Suburban Fairy Tale' by Katherine Mansfield, covered in a paper by María Casado, is a brilliant tale I'd not come across before and really should have. It's available to read online here.

• I was intrigued by humorist James Thurber's tales, covered in a paper by John P. Pazdziora. Thurber has been named as an influence by Neil Gaiman and I definitely want to read more.

• Hearing about Rikki Ducornet's tales, in a paper by Dr Michelle Ryan-Sautour, was a revelation for me. Why had I never heard of Ducornet before?! I am now desperate to read her collections The One Marvelous Thing and The Complete Butcher's Tales. Hunting for info on her online I've come across this interview and this electronic chapbook (which features several of her tales and some of her artwork for the wonderful Borges story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'). Ducornet is also the illustrator for Kate Bernheimer's forthcoming collection of fairy tales Horse, Flower, Bird (another book I want!).

Some of the other writers covered (whose work I was already more familiar with) included A S Byatt, Roald Dahl, Sara Maitland, Margaret Atwood and, of course, Angela Carter.

Art and the anti-tale:
As well as literature we were treated to several papers on the anti-tale in the work of visual artists such as Dorothea Tanning (I have included her painting Birthday, to the right) and Paula Rego. The symposium also had a resident artist, Robert Powell (I've included an image by him at the top of this post). He is currently exhibiting his stunning work at the Henderson Gallery in Edinburgh.

In terms of film, a paper by Professor Suzanne Buchan on the Quay Brothers' Street of Crocodiles, followed by a screening of the film was a real treat. Buchan's paper also included what has to be my favourite quote from the symposium, taken from the Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin:

Children are fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, carpentry, tailoring or whatever. In these waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together materials of widely differing kinds in a new volatile relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within the larger one. The fairy-tale [sic] is such a waste product—perhaps the most powerful to be found in the spiritual life of humanity: a waste product that emerges from the growth and decay of the saga. With the stuff of fairy-tales the child may be as sovereign and uninhibited as with rags and building blocks. Out of fairy-tale motifs the child constructs its world, or at least it forms a bond with these elements.

(I found the quote online, in a paper by Buchan on 'Animation Spectatorship: The Quay Brothers' "Animated Worlds"', in EnterText journal)


So what is an anti-tale?
I'm not a literary theorist, or fairy tale scholar, I research fairy tales for fun (and get a lot of inspiration from them for my own writing along the way). Whilst the term anti-tale was used and applied widely at the symposium I think everyone had their own particular idea of what it means. Retellings, reimagnings, subversions, new tales—all can come under the banner of anti-tale if they are employing motifs, or themes, or characters from the glorious ragbag of traditional tales in non-traditional ways.

What the symposium brought to light, for me, was the sheer abundance of anti-tales in literature and art. And although anti-tales can be identified as being contemporaneous with the oldest known fairy tales, within 20th and early 21st century literature they would seem to be the dominant of the two forms.

Anti-tales and fairy tales draw from the same well of material, but, perhaps, where a fairy tale dips a sturdy wooden bucket beneath the surface, the anti-tale is as likely to use a glass bucket, or a plastic sandcastle one, or a shoe. We are lucky to have such a diversity of tales to treasure.


Many thanks to symposium co-organiser Catriona McAra for sending the photo of me above, and to her and David Calvin for such a fantastic event in all respects!

Guest post: Matthew Finch on ZooNation's 'Into the Hoods'

This summer, ZooNation’s Into the Hoods has returned to London at the Royal Festival Hall after an acclaimed 2008 season in the West End.

The ninety-minute urban dance show, which made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, follows a boy and girl who, venturing out of their playground, become prisoners of the landlord of the Ruff Endz estate.

At the outset, a narrator speaks over animations of an illuminated manuscript book and a twinkling music-box refrain, giving the gloss of tradition, but the MC’s announcement, ‘This is theatre…but this is hip-hop theatre, so MAKE SOME NOISE!’ lets audiences know that they’re not exactly in for Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen.

On the Ruff Endz estate, familiar figures from the world of fairytale are updated for the urban present. Spinderella is an aspiring DJ; ‘Prince’ is a Pop Idol reject, the estate’s ‘E-list’ celebrity; Wolf is a money-grabbing wannabe record mogul, while Lil Red dreams of singing stardom, and Jax of being a record producer, while the crimelord Giant does his deals from a penthouse at the top of the tower block.

The landlord makes a bargain with the lost children – he will give them money for bus tickets home if they fetch gifts for the 18th birthday of his daughter Rap-on-Zel: ‘An iPod white as milk, a hoodie as red as blood, weave as yellow as corn, and trainers as pure as gold.’

On their quest, the children interact with the iconic fairytale characters, who play out their stories in contemporary form – Wolf luring Lil Red into an exploitative record contract by impersonating her Grandma, Jax ascending to the Giant’s penthouse for a martial-arts faceoff, and Spinderella empowered to DJ at Prince’s ball, thanks to the gold shell-suited Fairy Gee, who dances to Destiny’s Child’s Independent Women.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in this witty, energetic show – from the spot-on musical choices (Spinderella’s theme is the plaintive ‘Roads’ by Portishead, that of the Ugly Sisters ‘U-G-L-Y’ by Daphne and Celeste) to the inspired choreography, including a couple of eye-popping perspective shifts which allow the Giant to fall ‘away’ from the audience and Rap-on-Zel’s hair to be climbed across stage to the theme from Mission: Impossible.

The whole show is ripe with modern references – the due date for Jax’s rent is counted down as an homage to ‘24’, and pensioners dance off with zimmer frames and wheelchairs in a parody of It’s Like That, while Rap-on-Zel’s room is decorated with posters of Eminem, Foxy Brown and Missy Elliott…and prison-style tally marks scratched on her wall.

For fairy tale lovers, however, the most exciting change to the traditional stories lies in their juxtaposition. What were, in traditional versions, quest narratives with single protagonists, become the linked struggles of a community on the estate. Friendships and allegiances complicate the idea of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters – ‘Prince’ is unreliable and egotistical, but he gets on with Jax; the girls show solidarity with one another and are all equally immune to reject Prince’s advances; when Jax is evicted and left homeless, it is Lil Red who is there for him (they share iPod earphones and even have a romantic moment beneath a ‘Match.com’ billboard).

The production is punchy, unsentimental about its urban setting, but also true to the tales from which it draws, and positive about the human spirit to the extent that every character gets their happy ending (including the Ugly Sisters, who become a girl group lip-synching to the Shoop Shoop Song).

Kate Prince’s show remains an inspired and vibrant tribute to the power of the fairy tale, loosely adapted from Sondheim’s Into the Woods but by now very much its own work. It’s on throughout the first half of August at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, and well worth a visit for any lover of fairytales. You’ll find all the information you need for a visit at www.intothehoods.com


Matthew Finch blogs at booksadventures.blogspot.com

Quick Link: Top 10 transformations

A lovely list of transformation stories, compiled for the Guardian by Ali Shaw (author of haunting transformation novel The Girl with Glass Feet).

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

This is a story about a wonderful looking book that is coming out, and also about why Facebook sometimes makes me happy (I'm a late convert). I only found out about this forthcoming title—due out September 28th—because I saw a post from the Fairy Tale Review Facebook page, which in turn led me to the My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me Facebook page, as both journal and book are edited by tireless champion of fairy tales Kate Bernheimer.

The description of the book from the Penguin site says:

The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling volume-the ultimate literary costume party.

Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino.

Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

The title of the book is a line from the Grimms' The Juniper Tree, which is reimagined in the book by Alissa Nutting. Make sure you 'Like' the book's Facebook page as they keep posting up tantalising little tidbits from the tales and links to some great interviews with contributors.

Other fairy tale related Facebook pages I'd recommend are the Cabinet des Fées one, the SurLaLune one and, of course, the New Fairy Tales one.

Teen writing contest

There's still time to work on an entry for the Diamonds and Toads writing contest for teens, they are looking for retellings of Cinderella, and if you are aged between 13 and 18 you can send your entry to them during 'one magical day'—August the 15th. If you're not a teenager yourself please pass this on to any fairy tale loving teens you know. Full details of the competition are available here.


The illustration is by Jennie Harbour, and taken from My Favourite Book of Fairy Tales (1921)

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment Symposium

Registration is now open for this fascinating looking symposium being held at the University of Glasgow on the 12th-13th August. It is free to attend and the full programme is available online here. There is a great range of papers being given and panels with titles such as 'Wicked Women and Feminist Anti-texts', 'Not so, SnowWhite', 'Bluebeard', 'Surrealist Anti-tales', and 'Cinematic Reimaginings'.

John Patrick Pazdziora, whose wonderful fairy tale 'Ragabone' we published in Issue 5 of New Fairy Tales will be giving a paper entitled ‘ ‘‘You Know How Happy Kings Are”: The Anti-Fairytales of James Thurber’. And I am very excited to have been asked to give a reading of my fiction and to talk a little bit about New Fairy Tales. I'll be reading my anti-tale 'Raven', which was published online at Cabinet des Fées, and a new story 'Feather Girls' which is an anti-tale inspired by the swan maiden tale collected by Joseph Jacobs.

At the moment, the anti-tale is an under-researched concept, despite its being a popular form in terms of genre publishing. The symposium's organisers, Catriona McAra and David Calvin, have this to say about it:

The anti-fairy tale has long existed as a shadow of the traditional fairy tale genre. First categorized as the 'antimärchen' in Andre Jolles' seminal Einfache Formen (c.1930), the anti-tale was found to be contemporaneous with even the oldest known examples of fairy tale collections. Rarely an outward opposition to the traditional form itself, the anti-tale takes aspects of the fairy tale genre and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirizes elements of them to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. Red Riding Hood may elope with the wolf. Or Bluebeard's wife is not interested in his secret chamber. Snow White's stepmother gives her own account of events and Cinderella does not exactly find the prince charming.

The anti-fairy tale takes many forms. Some revisit and deconstruct familiar narratives (as above) or formulate new stories, characters and ever-afters, relying on and subverting familiar archetypes and plot devices. Following Jolles' seminal, respected text, the subgenre of the anti-tale has become dominant, as writers such as Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman and Phillip Pullman, artists such as Kiki Smith, Anna Gaskell and Kara Walker, and filmmakers such as Matthew Bright and Jane Campion have produced a diverse collage of anti-tales.

(read more here)

The organisers can be contacted with any enquiries at: antitales@googlemail.com. And I would really encourage anyone with an interest in fairy tales, who can get there, to come along and participate. It would be lovely to meet you (and for people who live too far away, I'll report back here after the event).

Profile: Bluebeard

'Killing wives since 1697'

Name: Barbe Bleue or Bluebeard

Age: The oldest literary version of the story is by Charles Perrault and was published in 1697, but the tale was based on much older oral folktales.

Location: France. There has been much speculation over whether Perrault based Bluebeard on Gilles de Rais, a 15th c. Breton knight who fought alongside Joan of Arc and murdered children in his spare time. Blue-Beard a contribution to history and folk-lore is a book dedicated to the subject, although as the tale is closely related to many other folktales worldwide this link is often disputed.

Appearance: Did I mention he has a blue beard? He does in Perrault's version anyway, a beard which 'made him so frightfully ugly that all the women and girls ran away from him'. He's not to be confused with the pirate, whose beard was actually black.

Relationship Status: Interested in women. But would you want to marry him? Whether you take the tale to be about a psychopathic serial killer, or simply about the dangers of marriage in an age when death during childbirth was more common, he's not a good prospect. Especially if you add to that Perrault's view that the tale is really about the evils of women's curiosity (i.e. serves them right).

Best lines written about him: I couldn't write this profile without getting some Angela Carter in it, in her version of the tale, the title story in the collection The Bloody Chamber, her narrator says of him:

I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh.

Some places you'll find him online:
Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber, an essay by Terri Windling
An annotated version of the tale, along with history and illustrations on SurLaLune
Bluebeard stories collected by D. L. Ashliman
Bluebeard's Keys and Other Stories, by Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The Grey Woman, a reimagining of the Bluebeard story by Elizabeth Gaskell
Bluebeard's Final Girl, or, The Revisionist, a poem by Veronica Schanoes
The book for Offenbach's Opera of the tale
Bluebeard a 1944 film starring John Carradine (available to watch online)
Bluebeard; or Female Curiosity poster and info about a 1798 performance
Some other tales with murderous grooms: Fitcher's Bird, Mr Fox, The Robber Bridegroom, Cannetella

And if that's not enough Bluebeard for you, you could also try Catherine Breillat's new film. It got a cinema release in the UK on Friday but I've read that it has gone straight to DVD in the US.


There is an interview with Catherine Breillat in The Guardian and reviews of the film in The Guardian and The New York Times.

The illustration at the top of the post is taken from The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book, illustrated by Walter Crane. I love the fact that in this book 'Bluebeard' is published alongside 'The Baby's Own Alphabet', which says something about our changing relationship with the story and with our children.


Previous profiles: Goldilocks, Jack (of the beanstalk fame), Little Red Riding Hood, The Big Bad Wolf

When I went to play at the Manchester Children's Book Festival...

(click on the image to see a larger version)

... I had an amazing time. I ran three family fairy tale workshops, in which everyone, from toddlers to adults, had fun dressing up, drawing and creating new fairy tales together. The picture above was drawn by festival illustrator Dai Owen, who came in and magically captured four of the participants in just a couple of minutes (they were busy trying to work out which key would unlock the bird cage in the golden castle, at the top of the glass mountain—they decided a feather key would do it in the end).

I owe a lot of thank yous; to the festival organisers for such a lovely day, to friends Carys Bray and Elaine Wilson, who did a fantastic job running the New Fairy Tales stall, giving away postcards, badges and selling some handmade chapbooks of our stories to raise money for Derian House Children's Hospice. And, to various members of my family (Mum, Dad, Aunty T & Grandma), who were dragged into making everything from crowns and keys to capes and banners! And thank you to Dai for allowing me to share his wonderful drawing.

The festival website is still online, so if you missed it you can still have a nosey at what went on, and the good news is the festival will return in 2012.

A competition

I've really deliberated over whether to post about this or not. In the end I decided I wasn't comfortable posting about it directly, but I didn't feel happy about not flagging up the opportunity for anyone who might be interested. A UK television and broadband provider (who are part of a multinational media empire) are running a competition looking for tweet length new endings to fairy tales. There are full details posted on the SurLaLune blog here.

The illustration is by the wonderful John Bauer (1882-1918) from the tale 'The Boy and the Trolls, or the Adventure' which is included in Swedish Folk Tales, a book I really treasure (and far be it from me to use my illustration choice to suggest Mr Murdoch is a money grabbing troll, and that one of his companies is simultaneously trying to bag themselves plenty of free advertising via social networking platforms and to associate the use of their services with a 'happily ever after').

Some lesser known Grimms' tales

The Old Woman in the Woods by Adam Oehlers

I have several collections of the Grimms' tales, but I've had my favourite since I was seven. It's a big chunky book called The Illustrated Treasury of the Brothers Grimm, illustrated by Luděk Maňásek, with translations by Vladimir Varecha.

The illustrations are peculiar but vivid, the translations are written in a bright, simple style and the publisher is (rather fittingly) called Treasure Press. But, for me, the best thing about this book is how many tales it has in it: 87. Which is still only a portion of the 210 tales included in the Grimms' final (1857) edition of Children's and Household Tales, but it's more than are in the other collections I own. It's a book I can still get lost in.

I often wonder what makes editors choose a small number of the Grimms' tales to publish over and over again, particularly when it comes to illustrated texts and picture books. Perhaps it's because they think readers only want to revisit tales they are familiar with, but there are many other wonderful tales hidden away that I'm sure would become just as popular if they were given the chance.

I think my favourite is The Old Woman in the Wood. It's a strange name for a story in which the said old woman plays only a small (but villainous) part. The tale is really about a girl who finds herself lost in a forest. She is visited by a bird who brings her keys so she can unlock the trees... (I'm not going to say any more because I want to encourage you to follow the link and read it in full).

Some other tales I've long loved but haven't found elsewhere as often as I would have liked are: The Glass Coffin—which features a tiny castle and a princess trapped in glass chests (although AS Byatt has retold this and you can find her fantastic version in both Possession and in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye); Jorinde and Joringel—which is a beautiful bird transformation tale; and The Seven Ravens—another bird transformation tale, which features a sister setting out to rescue her brothers from inside a glass mountain.

I have been reading from The Illustrated Treasury of the Brothers Grimm since I was seven and I can't see myself ever tiring of it. In Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales, Max Lüthi has this to say about the appeal of fairy tales for adults, as well as children:

The fairy tale portrays, in a wider sense than is generally realized, a harmonious world. The confidence from which it flows is transmitted to both those who tell it and those who hear it. Thus, it is no wonder that not only children come under its spell, but that it repeatedly exerts its charm over adults. It gives not only pleasure, it gives form and inspiration; and we can readily believe the report of a north German storyteller that a soothing and healing power can emanate from fairy tales when told to sick people in hospitals. Every fairy tale is, in its own way, something of a dragon slayer.

The beautiful illustration at the head of this post is by Adam Oehlers, whose story 'Dear Little Emmie' features in the latest issue of New Fairy Tales. Adam is extending the story at the moment and it will be published as a book in early 2011.

The tales I have linked to above are from Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation. All 210 tales from this translation are available on the SurLaLune site.

There's a new issue of Enchanted Conversation online...

...and it features short stories, poetry and essays inspired by 'The Little Mermaid' and other mermaid, nixy and sea witch tales. I can't wait to settle down to read it!

There are also two contests you can enter, one which asks writers to explore what it would feel like to be a "Daughter of the Air" (as in Andersen's original tale) in a poem or story, and another asking readers to suggest a menu for a mermaid-related meal for the journal's Fairy Tale Food Editor (with a note from Kate Wolford, the Editor, to say they do not mean some type of hideous mer-cannibalism!).

I have a poem called The Blackpool Mermaid in this issue and I should probably explain for readers outside the UK that Blackpool isn't, as its name might suggest, a dark, enchanted pool but a famous Lancashire seaside town (not too far from where I live). Once incredibly popular with holidaymakers, it's been in decline since the mid 20th century but it still has some charms.

As with previous issues of this journal, readers are warmly encouraged to join in and comment. You can enter the Enchanted Conversation here.

New Fairy Tales: Issue 5

The trailer...




and the issue itself...



We hope you enjoy it!

Visit the website if you'd like to download the PDF version or find out more about New Fairy Tales. And please help us to spread the word about this issue; share the YouTube trailer with friends or 'Like' us on Facebook. Thank you :-)

Manchester Children's Book Festival

I'm very excited about this! Here's the introduction to the forthcoming Manchester Children's Book Festival by Poet Laureate, Festival Director (and fine fairy tale writer) Carol Ann Duffy:

The 2010 Manchester Children’s Book Festival is the first festival of its kind to run in the North West of England. We’re thrilled to present a four-day programme of events and activities featuring some of today’s favourite children’s writers, illustrators, books and characters.

Aimed at everyone who has ever loved children’s books, our exciting series of events will run at Manchester Metropolitan University’s city centre campus as well as in a variety of schools, libraries and other venues across the region.

No matter if you can’t make it to Manchester – you’ll still be able to take part in our competitions and in our international Festival Readathon. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you can join us.

Carol Ann Duffy

There are far too many wonderful events taking place for me to list here, the full programme is available online. Highlights for me include: Carol Ann Duffy and John Sampsons' performance of The Princess' Blankets (the space will be decorated by Catherine Hyde's beautiful illustrations so that 'you'll feel you're stepping into the book'); the screening of Jeannette Winterson's Ingenious, introduced by the writer; wonderful pop-up book workshops; Michael Rosen leading a Bear Hunt!; a lecture on the World of Edward Gorey; an A-Z of Children's Books exhibition; Adele Geras and Mary Hoffman discussing their imaginative historical fiction; and a chance to meet three of the authors behind the latest series of Doctor Who novels (Daleks and Cybermen will be patrolling the building!). Phew.

Faye Durston and myself will be taking part in the Family Festival Fun Day on the Saturday. We'll have a New Fairy Tales stall and be running Family Fairy Tale workshops which will involve dressing up, drawing and lots of fun!

If you're too far away to make it to the festival there is still the international readathon you can take part in (and I'm planning a special fairy tale read as part of that which I'll blog about soon). If you think you might make the trip, and you're not familiar with Manchester, Creative Tourist is a great online guide to the city.

Hope to see you there!

Scheherezade’s Bequest

Issue 10 of Scheherezade’s Bequest is now online at the Cabinet Des Fées website. It's one of my favourite journals and I can't wait to settle down this evening to read it. I am also incredibly excited because I have a story in this issue.

It's a contemporary tale inspired by the opening lines of the Grimms' tale The Raven, in which a mother wishes her fractious baby daughter would become a raven and fly away so that she could get some peace; the girl promptly does. I wanted to see what would happen if the raven couldn't fly away. (In the original tale 'she flew into a dark wood and stayed there a long time, and her parents knew nothing of her'. The tale then follows the adventures of the man who must release the raven girl from the bewitchment.)

Ravens appear frequently in myth, fairy tales and folklore, joining a host of other birds (there's a wonderful article on bird lore by Terri Windling here). I have always been fascinated by tales in which people are transformed into birds. I suppose it's because of the sense of freedom I imagine in flight, although in fairy tales being transformed into a bird is as often an ordeal as it is the form someone chooses.

One thing I was intrigued to find out when I was researching real (as opposed to literary) ravens is that they are playful birds and one of the few species who make their own toys. There's lots more raven info on Wikipedia and you can also hear a raven here (as recorded by naturesongs.com).

The Beastly Bride

The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People is the fourth anthology in Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's Mythic Fiction Series. The anthology contains tales and poems of animal-human transformation by writers including Gregory Frost, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Delia Sherman and Jane Yolen. You can read the preface to the anthology here.

My copy hasn't arrived yet but I wanted to post about the book now because this week Charles Tan has been interviewing the writers who have contributed to the anthology for SF Signal and Terri Windling has been collecting the links to those interviews here. It's fascinating to be able to read about the creative process the writers went though, and to find out about their inspirations and thoughts on the Beastly Bride concept.

Midori Snyder has also collected together links to the interviews so far and links to a lovely selection of essays in the Journal of Mythic Arts Archives which relate to the subject. Shape Shifters: Art Inspired by Animal-Human Transformation Myths is another treasure from the JoMA site not to be missed and I'd also recommend Marina Warner's essay on animals in fairy tales. And if all that hasn't whetted your appetite enough there are also some reviews up here and here.

Also on Terri Windling's blog this week people from all over the world have been sending in the view from their window. A lot of the people work with fairy tales or in other realms of fantasy and art and it's wonderful to see so many distinctive views (I did send mine in and yes it is a bit grim looking compared to all the rural idylls but I like it anyway!).



The beautiful swan maiden painting in this post is by Romina Perez. You can see more of her work on her blog and website. (The image is used with permission). And if you'd like to find out more about swan maidens there's a wonderful selection of their tales here.

Quick Link: Germaine Greer on Old Wives' Tales

'There are thousands of learned discussions of fairy tales but very few that approach them from the old wives' perspective, with the result that the obvious goes unnoticed.'

So says Germain Greer in a fascinating and insightful article in today's Guardian which explores the tradition of tale telling by women. Well worth a read!

Guest post: Matthew Finch on Playbox Theatre's 'The Bloody Chamber'

Going in for the kill: Playbox Electric Carousel’s
The Bloody Chamber

Cox’s Yard in Stratford-upon-Avon was the venue for last month’s stage adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, devised and performed by members of youth theatre company Playbox.

As the audience arrived, the stairs to the riverside performance space were strewn with pages torn from women’s magazines, blurring the transition from everyday life to a darker fairytale world. On stage, girls in heavy 1980’s make-up, with back-combed hair and red sashes, hands clutched to hearts, stood frozen by the sound of a high pitched alarm.

In the opening dance, a suited man – the malevolent husband of the protagonist – moved among the girls, posing them, dancing with them, tearing out their hearts in his search for the perfect woman. The show, which centres on Carter’s version of the Bluebeard myth, follows a newlywed’s discovery that her husband has murdered his previous wives in the chamber of the title.

As director Alice Trew explains, her take on Carter strips the 1979 story collection ‘down to the bare bones, giving the essence of a harsh and violent tale’. Trew’s magpie approach steals scenes from across Carter’s writing, but violence, control and desire are always at the fore of this potent staging. With virtually no dialogue in the show, Carter’s sensuous language is invoked by melodramatic choreography – most effectively in the sequence where the husband uses mirrors to multiply his wife into a ‘harem’.

One effect of the wordless, iconic approach is to remove the context of the Bluebeard story, which Carter set in post-revolutionary France. Place names are erased, and a red ribbon tied around the bride’s neck still stands for decapitation, but no longer relates to the ironic neckwear which aristocrats wore if they had escaped the Terror.

For Trew, this stripping out of detail universalizes the issue of women’s suffering under patriarchy, across nations and throughout history. In the story’s resolution, which is greatly changed, women’s capacity to jointly resist oppression is emphasised. Where Carter has the bride’s mother ride to the rescue toting a handgun, the husband here dies at the hands of the girls whose hearts he stole in the opening dance, with the mother delivering the coup de grace.

The original’s happily-ever-after conclusion is replaced by an extended sequence derived from Carter’s vampiric Lady of the House of Love. The widowed bride blinds herself with the key to her husband’s chamber and attacks the women’s magazines that litter the stage with their incessant bombardment of words and images. She feasts on stolen hearts…before turning on her new lover to quote her husband’s ominous words: ‘This is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable.’

All of this could seem like a blunt, though necessary and laudable, retread of 70’s and 80’s feminist polemic – The Beauty Myth For Beginners by a youth theatre company. In fact, the Playbox production offers something more complex. The opening sequence, set to the pastiche electro of La Roux, creates a kind of historical commentary on the 80’s – a decade of blood and opulence – from a company of players not born in the decade. As the music leads us through to the present day, the protagonist’s journey becomes also a journey from the feminism of the 70’s to women’s contemporary struggles, as charted by these young performers.

The show as a whole, with its fairytale atmosphere and uncompromising gender politics, is an invocation of fables in a 21st century that, from Twilight to Doctor Who and The Fairy Tale Cupboard itself, has returned to the fairy tale to make sense of the world around us. In this world, Trew suggests, ‘Women have forsaken trying to be angels and instead focus on simply not becoming monsters’.


Matthew Finch blogs at booksadventures.blogspot.com
Photographs by James Blay

Once upon a time...

I was going to try and write a short fairy tale as some kind of justification for including this post on what is essentially a topic blog. But fairy tales don’t deal in democracy. In the UK it doesn't always feel like we do either.

During my lifetime the UK has been failed, first by a Tory government, then by Blair and Browns’ false Labour. Our politicians have helped instigate an illegal war and facilitated economic disaster.

Our parliament is full of wolves. In Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood the wolf eats the girl, she doesn't escape; in the Grimms’ version she must be rescued by the Huntsman. I prefer the version where she sorts things out for herself.

We don’t know what the ending of the current election tale will be but I’m one of the many people who feels, as not all votes count, we haven’t been given a chance to sort things out for ourselves. If you’re a British citizen consider signing this petition for electoral reform and joining the forthcoming demonstrations. In life there can’t be a happily ever after but there must be better than this.


Some additional links:
The BBC's Q&A: Calls to change the UK election voting system
The Electoral Reform Society
Fair votes now!, Comment at The Guardian
Kay Burley bullies a protester - an example of what passes for journalism in the Murdoch empire
Chris Riddell's 'fairy in search of electoral reform'


The image in this post is from ruSSeLL hiGG's Flickr stream and is under a CC license, it was photographed in East London the day after the election.

Call for submissions - Enchanted Conversation

Enchanted Conversation, is an online fairy tale magazine in Blogger format. They are currently publishing four issues a year, each takes the theme of a traditional tale as its starting point. Submissions are now open for 'The Little Mermaid' issue. They are also happy to look at submissions inspired by other watery tales such as Undine and The Nixy. The deadline is the 15th May and full submission guidelines are available here.

Also not to be missed are the two contests they're running alongside their current 'Beauty and the Beast' issue. One is a writing contest, and for the other you need only join in the conversation and comment on a piece in the issue to be entered.

Illustration by Edmund Dulac, taken from Stories from Hans Andersen (1911) on the Internet Archive.

A feast of fairy tales...

There are so many delicious looking fairy tale treats to feast on this week. The new issue of Goblin Fruit, the fantastical poetry zine, is up. And to celebrate their fourth birthday they're giving away lovely icons, like the one to the left, for you to peruse and use (the icons have been created by Deborah J. Brannon, using Oliver Hunter's gorgeous artwork).

The second issue of Enchanted Conversation has also gone live. It's dedicated to Beauty and the Beast and is packed with retellings, reimaginings and reviews of the tale. I can't wait to dig in!

And, if you're still not full up from all that fairy tale goodness, tomorrow night Heston's Fairytale Feast will air on Channel 4 at 9pm. The pudding sounds good: 'the guests make their way through a wooded glade to find a Hansel and Gretel house made entirely of sweets'. But I'm not so sure about some of the other recipes, which, according to the Radio Times, include 'Snow White-style apples, made from blown sugar piped full of boar mousse' and 'chicken testicles done in the style of jelly beans (with a squid-ink coating).'

Hmmm I think I'll stick to reading the tales...

Addition to post: Here's the programme on YouTube if you didn't catch it. Thanks to redridingtweets for the link.

The instructions you'll need...

... if you ever find yourself in a fairy tale:

The book trailer for Neil Gaiman's forthcoming Instructions, beautifully illustrated by Charles Vess (the direct YouTube link is here).

You can also read the text for the poem in the JoMA archives.