Writing Wednesday... The land of Fairy Tale

I have always been fascinated by Fairy Tales. Something about them sings to the blood. That might be a strange way to describe it but Fairy Tales deal in the elements of existence, blood, water, snow, woods and shadows. They make our dreams flesh and our fears manifest. When I think of fairy tales, I think of a low hanging apple, bright red and crisp but perhaps when one bites into the flesh one will find a pale little worm writhing away from your sharp toothed kiss.
Strange truth, it has been many years since I last found a worm in an apple. Sometimes I find the thin paths they make. Perhaps the worms have begun to tell fairy tales about people and know to run away in fright.
Like many children of the 20th Century my first introduction to fairy tales was through the bright, wide eyed fantasies of Disney. Like many children of the 1990’s my first princess was Belle, heroine of “Beauty and the Beast”. How I wanted to be her!
Strangely, if I try to recall Belle now, almost twenty years after our first encounter I can call to mind only the rose and the bell jar of the film. A few notes of songs linger but it’s the rose I can see clearly. Year by year, the image becomes a little more steampunk, darker and more Victorian.
Interesting, since my relationship with fairy tales did not end with those flickering cinematic images.
I moved on from Disney to my Mothers collection of Arthur Rackham’s Grimm and Angela Barrett’s Snow White, to a world where Queen’s expressions shift imperceptibly like sweet glaciers as they lean out from their windows and marvel at the contrast of a drop of blood on the snow.
From Rackham and Barrett I moved on to Angela Carter and the reinvention of fairy tales, tracked down editions of Grimm’s fairy tales which included those tales which they included in their notebooks and not in their finished editions for the fear of upsetting the children.
Now, I have moved on to Marina Warner and her marvellous analysis of Fairy Tales: “From The Beast to The Blond”. Since this beautiful tome arrived in the post, my second hand edition from 1994 even came with the delightful bonus of newspaper reviews clipped out and tucked in by it’s first owner, I have been fixed to the page absorbing detail after detail.

 From Anne of Austria and Louis XIV’s adulation of St. Anne and childlike spontaneous spirituality influencing the emergence of Fairy Tale culture in 17th Century France (not to mention womens writing and the Frond) to the symbolism of hair in fairy tale, every page one turns overflows with gems a little like a brush through enchanted hair.
The path into the land of fairy is a strange one, as much in the shadows of the woods as in the clearings and who knows where it will finally lead you.
In my case, it has led me back to my own writing. Whilst my first books were very much the product of Victorian Gothic, Stoker and Wilde ran in their blood, my most recent novel and the ideas in my notebooks have been rather more fairy tale than hansom cab in the fog (of course, some have been a little bit of both).
When I write I often begin with an image I know has drifted down from the vast library of fairy tale knowledge. I begin writing with falling snow, a crisp apple, a fat red rose, a monstrous key or a glass coffin dancing in my head. I have developed a slight obsession with a version of “Beauty and the Beast” recorded by the Grimm's called “The Winter Rose” and find it’s themes dropping like snowflakes into my paragraphs. Perhaps that is only natural, after all we now know that audiences have been delighted by that particular story for over 5,000 years just as Cinderella and her lost slipper have struck a note with thousands of generations and across continents. Something old stirs in these tales, maybe we don’t yet know how old? But I’ve played with that idea before, asked if stories so strange might have roots of truth
Once you begin to pursue fairy tales you risk toppling over and falling headlong, like Alice, down a rabbit hole of imagery and allegory, see I am doing it now. I don’t expect to ever be an Angela Carter, to her alone was left some rare knowledge of the human heart. But I cannot help but follow the thread of fairy tales and ask my own questions: what would have happened if Cinderella saved herself, if Sleeping Beauty were a man, if Little Red Riding Hood had not gone into the woods?
Such exploration can take strange paths but they can pay off well, Terry Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm is far from a conventional retelling of fairy tales or of the lives of the brothers themselves but I adore it’s playful inventions and the way it conjures old imagery into fabulous new forms. Authors as disparate as Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman and Helen Oyeyemi have all done remarkable things with fairy tale building blocks Nothing is set in stone, the fairy tales are not exhausted as a source of inspiration, please do pick them up and have fun, from ancient lips to our modern ears they are still singing.