Nightbooks (2021)

Tonight, I watched Nightbooks (2021) for the first time. The beginning didn’t grab me, but I enjoyed the inventive aspects of the plot as they evolved throughout the story. I don’t have much to say so immediately after watching, so I’ll simply leave two notes.

• Filmmakers really love using “Hansel and Gretel” as inspiration for horror / scary / grim movies. This is at least the third that I’ve seen in the last decade.
• In this movie, the real horror is intergenerational trauma, with writer’s block coming in at a close second.

The Nutcracker

This time of year, productions of The Nutcracker (1892) ballet begin to appear. From the Christmas tree setting to the Christmas gift exchange’s kicking off of the plot, this fairy tale (as it is so popularly conceived that The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales lists it as such) would seem out of place at any other time of year.

The ballet itself is not directly drawn from folklore. Its first most obvious literary ancestor is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), itself considered a “literary fairy tale” by The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales. David Blamires argues that the Drosselmeier of Hoffmann’s tale is modeled on the eponymic character of the Grimms’ tale “König Drosselbart,” aka “King Thrushbeard” (1812).

Even though no performances are coming to my area this year (except the always-accessible Netflix film), I started thinking about the ballet. Is this ballet the origin of the decorated wooden nutcracker? Would anyone have created a tool shaped like a soldier before a dramatic work in which that tool turned into a living man?

Photo credit

First, I began where most people begin research: Wikipedia. This article on the nutcracker doll itself claims that they have been part of “German tradition” or “German folklore,” wherein they “are symbols of good luck, frightening away malevolent spirits” and “serving as protectors of a house.”

Wikipedia’s footnotes led me to the Slate article “In a Nutshell” by Noreen Malone. Malone points to “one popular origin myth” which

“holds that a wealthy but lonely farmer who found the process of cracking nuts to be detrimental to his productivity (efficiency even pervades German folklore!) offered a reward to whoever could come up with the best solution. Each villager drew on his own professional expertise—a carpenter advocating sawing them open, a soldier shooting the suckers. But it was the puppetmaker—a profession that seems to loom large in European tall tales —who won the day, building a strong-jawed, lever-mouthed doll.”

What an interesting tale! I would love to read it, but Malone does not provide a title. Malone found the information from the hobbyist book Ornamental and Figural Nutcrackers by Judith Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse’s book is not held locally, and I cannot find it online.

Photo by N J on Pexels.com

 

The website run by The Australian Ballet company suggests a similar folkloric origin story:

“But like all good folkloric traditions, the nutcracker also has a more romantic origin story. Long ago, so another tale goes, a miserly farmer promised a reward to anyone who could crack his walnuts. From the village of Seiffen came a carver with a marvellous wooden puppet, its jaws colourfully painted and powerful enough to crack nuts. Job done! The farmer cheerfully rewarded the entire village.”

Seiffen is a German town in the heart of the Ore Mountains. It is also the heart of the wooden toy industry according to, again, Wikipedia.

I don’t claim to know every Grimm Brothers tale by heart, but I don’t think this is one of theirs. They lived in Kassel during their peak years of writing the KHM, and Google Maps says that their town is over four hours away from Seiffen traveling by car (or a 69 hour walk).

Does anyone out there know a title, author, date — anything about the original nutcracker fairy tale?

Happy holidays, everyone!

 

Out-of-copyright update

In April, I wrote a blog post about many creative works entering the public domain because their protections expired. Recently, I found an article from August reporting that many books published before 1964 have already been in the public domain because their creators did not actively pursue copyright protections. This gives us a source for finding many more lesser-known fairy tales that were in the public domain all along.

The Secretly Public Domain page on the Mastodon social media site, which I found through the previous article, publicizes individual works in the public domain. I have gone through every update to date and found the following entries from related fields that would be of interest to the fairy-tale scholar:

Rip Van Winkle and The legend of Sleepy Hollow (1951 edition), Washington Irving

The Mermaids (1956), Eva Boros

An annotated collection of Mongolian riddles (1954), Archer Taylor

Slavic folklore, a symposium (1956), Albert Bates Lord

And these about children:

Move on, Youth! (1940), T. Otto Nall

The Psychology of Childhood (1930), Edgar James Swift

The moderator of this account has been publishing “toots” since July. The most recent update was a few hours ago. This site will be a good place to monitor every so often for more fairy-tale content.

What About Disney’s Copyrighted Works?

In my last blog post, I listed some fairy-tale works I found that are out of copyright as of 2019. No scholar would conflate the Walt Disney Company with fairy tales, but the two are closely joined in the popular imagination because so many of the company’s films are based on fairy-tale plots. Because of this I thought that Disney’s history is relevant, though best in a separate post.

In short: we the public gain nothing from the Disney canon. 1923 was a rough year for Walt Disney. He had such bad luck professionally that he filed for bankruptcy in July. The year ended well, with a contract to produce “Alice Comedies” based upon Lewis Carroll’s books, but these did not come out until 1924. (All information from the D23 website.) 1923 is considered by The Walt Disney Company to be its start.

Disney’s seven Laugh-O-Gram films, each of which features a different fairy tale, were already in the public domain prior to 2019. These shorts, such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” are available on Youtube.

What Fairy Tale Versions Are Now Out of Copyright?

As of the first day of 2019, for the first time in over 20 years, the copyrights of certain published works have expired. As the Duke Law School explains, this means that “[w]orks from 1923 will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee. They include dramatic films such as The Ten Commandments, and comedies featuring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. There are literary works by Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, and Edith Wharton, the “Charleston” song, and more.” Surely, among these riches are fairy-tale versions that fans may now freely remix and academics may now incorporate into lectures. So what are they?

Walter de la Mare Crossings, A Fairy Play music by C. Armstrong Gibbs; illus. by Dorothy P. Lathrop Literary © 10 Nov 23 R71953 1-Dec-50

Walter de la Mare The Riddle and Other Tales Literary © 1 Jun 23 R71280 1-Dec-50

Charles L. Dodgson Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and Through the Looking-Glass illus. Edwin John Prittie Literary © 20 Nov 23 R73300 17-Jan-51

James G. Frazer Folk-lore and the Old Testament abridged ed. Literary © 11 Sep 23 R7871 11-Apr-51

Rudyard Kipling Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls Literary © 26 Oct 23 R69256 27-Oct-50

Carlo Lorenzini Pinnocchio, the Story of a Marionette trans. Sidney G. Firman; (C. Collodi was Lorenzini’s pseud.) Literary © 15 Nov 23 R73298 17-Jan-51

Renée Coudert Riggs Animal Stories from Eskimo Land illus. by George W. Hood Literary © 14 Sep 23 R78069 4-May-51

Carl Sandberg Rootabag Pigeons Literary © 13 Sep 23 R82883 4-Sep-51

Ruth Sawyer The Tale of the Enchanted Bunnies Literary © 7 Sep 23 R68952 30-Oct-50

Olive Schreiner Stories, Dreams and Allegories Literary © 22 Mar 23 R71676 14-Dec-50

May Sinclair Uncanny Stories illus. by Jean de Bosschère Literary © 25 sep 23 R67642 26-Sep-50

Ring Lardner Cinderella Periodical © 20 Jul 23 R64697 25-Jul-50

Georges Feydeau Feu La Mère de Madame Dramatic Work © 7 Apr 23 R64193 10-Jul-50

Henrik Ibsen Peer Gynt trans. by William and Charles Archer; introd. By William Archer Dramatic Work © 27 Apr 23 R77556 20-Apr-51

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris Seeing fairies. Two children, a boy and a girl in Colonial dress; girl holding hand against left cheek Artistic Work © 18 Oct 23 R73148 18-Jan-51

J. Hyde Price The all Mother Goose panorama. Artistic Work © 12 Nov 23 R85524 24-Oct-51

The above were all found through the wonderful and thorough spreadsheet of works provided by Duke Law at the link above. Since I have not read or seen all of the works compiled, and since Duke does not claim to have compiled an exhaustive list of new out-of-copyright works, I cannot claim that these are all of the works to use fairy-tale motifs.

The Hathi Trust has created a searchable database devoted to the 1923 newly-available works. A search of full text and all fields for “fairy*” reveals 7,265 works. This is unwieldy but a good place to start looking.

Open Library, a division of the Internet Archive, has published a chart showing how many books in their collection by year fall under the subject of “fairy tale.” The year 1923 has 41 editions. If publications from 1924 enter the public domain next year, then we will gain the free use of 34 fairy-tale books. Just after 1950, the number of entries explodes. The year 1993 has the greatest number of publications with 398 editions. I’m looking forward to the day that so many books enter the public domain–although it is likely to be several years until that happens.

This may seem like an unnecessary celebration. Obviously fairy-tale characters and plots have reappeared in new editions even after 1923. Aren’t fairy tales, like all folklore, out of copyright? Don’t they, by definition, belong to the folk generally? Well, yes, certainly. But the field of folklore study is nothing if not a study of different versions of combinations of motifs across the world. Each variant, even those told by specific authors and reserved with proper copyright, is important to the field’s overall quest to understand our shared human desire to tell stories. If nothing else, I now feel more confident about my legal ability to reproduce parts of these texts on a PowerPoint lecture in the classroom (or in this blog post, which uses an image by Gwendolen Raverat from the title page of De la Mare’s Crossings: A Fairy Play).

Readers, do you know of any other new entries to the public domain that I should add to this list?

 

UPDATE 8/24/19

Generational Tales Retold

I want to talk obliquely about Kiera Cass’s The Crown, which I read just before reading The Siren. This book and its companion piece, The Heir, are both part of The Selection Series. The first three novels in the series tell one story: “Cinderella” meets The Bachelor meets The Hunger Games meets World War IV. (I adore that worldbuilding and wish Cass did more with it.) These two books follow the daughter of the Cinderella figure. These two books are part of a trend asking, “What happens after Happily Ever After?” You also see this trend in the Disney Channel original movie Descendants (2015), The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002), The Little Mermaid II (2000), The Lion King II (1998), etc. I can’t say I’ve watched any of these sequels in their entirety, but they exist.

What is the draw of following the children of beloved figures? I can’t say it’s a desire to watch the whole, mundane life of a character play out, however beloved. I think it stems from a desire for the novel to never end, for the adventures to continue in perpetuity. Adventures, however, tend to give way to placidity. Perpetual adventuring is only possible in a situation like that of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, wherein the siblings live to adulthood in an Otherworld only to stumble back upon their previous lives in the normal world and resume growing up as children at the same age they had been when they left for Narnia. The human life just does not have enough time for so many adventures. Besides, accepted narratives of adulthood mean that adults cannot star in the sorts of dramas that we wish to see and still be viewed as properly grown-up. The teen Cinderella figure of The Selection has already had her story; further ones in adulthood would muddle the narrative. We readers must look to another teenager since we cannot have our original character, and the continuation is only acceptable if the new character is one so closely connected to the first that the transition hardly feels like a change at all.

This trend, then, highlights our culture’s desire to see youths starring in transformative adventures but desire for adults (20 and above, say) to settle down into more stable experiences. Readers want to stick with beloved characters, but cannot imagine them having futher adventures unless they haven’t properly become adults. Besides that, the Happily Ever After ending implies the situation has reached equilibrium. How could Happily Ever After be maintained if another adventure disrupts that stability? The next best option is following their children as they go through age-appropriate adventures ending with another satisfying Happily Ever After.

Work Cited:
Cass, Kiera. The Crown. NYC: HarperTeen-HarperCollins, 2016. Print.

Pokémon Go: Hag Stone for 21st Century Fairies

Long ago, when people believed in fairies, they longed for a way to see these supernatural creatures invisible to the naked eye. Maybe they were invisible because they were too tiny to see, as became the prevailing belief after Shakespeare, or maybe this was simply because the Fair Folk were supernatural, and as such they lived in an Otherworld that touched our own, but was not on our own plane of existence.

Source

So there came the belief that with the aid of certain tools, ordinary humans could see fairies. One such tool was a stone that had a naturally-occurring hole in it. One would hold this stone up to one’s eye, and through the hole one could see through the veil into the Otherworld of fairies. In the last decade this bit of folklore has featured in the book and movie versions of The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008 film) / The Seeing Stone (2003 book) by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, as well as in Coraline (2009 film, 2002 book) by Neil Gaiman. According to Wikipedia (that most respected of easy research sites), names for the magical stone include adder stones, hag stones, witch stones, serpent’s eggs, snake’s eggs, Glain Neidr, milpreve, adderstanes, Gloine nan Druidh, and finally aggry or aggri.

Pokémon Go is the new method for seeing into the Otherworld. Pokémon Go is a computer program in our phones, of course, but the app functions in the same way as would have the fairy stone method. A player gives the app permission to use the phone’s camera function, and then when Pokémon appear on the game map, they pop up as cartoons against the real-life backdrop the camera sees on the other side of the phone’s screen. The game infuses a bit of magic and whimsey into everyday experience, much as seeing a fairy creature where one had previously seen only one’s home and deep dark woods would have done. (Admittedly, that experience probably would have brought a great deal more fear than glimpsing a Pokémon.)

Humans always feel a pull to experience more in the world around us. We may get our fix of enhanced reality from a traditional religion, or a more geographically-based folk belief, or a globally-shared phenomenon of capitalism. In our connection to gods or fairies or Pokémon, people can feel as though they are specially connected to the world around us, tied to something beyond the mundane world most other people know to be the extent of living.

Augmented reality is a different experience than virtual reality. Other augmented reality games exist, such as Zombies, Run!, a GPS-based running app. Augmented reality may be here to stay, but I don’t foresee it being as celebrated as speculators in the 1980s might have expected. Pokémon Go did not retain its massive popularity even for half a year after its release. The Google Glass experiment has ended, and the Harry Potter Go game announced a few months ago has been debunked as a fake. However, I have no doubt that the enhanced reality game will only evolve into new forms (much like Pokémon evolve into stronger forms). As long as people strive to take a hero’s journey, and they have the ability to do so without actually abandoning the progress they have made on their normal lives, then the magic of augmented reality will continue to enchant.

Book Review – The Siren, Kiera Cass

Last night I read The Siren by Kiera Cass. It’s great to read a book in one day. While I was reading for my oral comps, I should have averaged a book a day, but I felt guilty skimming something I was going to be tested on, and I felt stressed at spending at least 3 days taking in a book properly. My reading life is much better on the other side of the defense. I know reading a YA book won’t help me write my dissertation, but it definitely helps me feel well-rounded and connected to current trends in my special topic of fairy tales.

The Siren is the first standalone book Cass has written, and just like her Selection series, this book makes frequent and explicit references to the fairy tale genre. I suspected this would be a re-vision of “The Little Mermaid,” but instead it draws upon siren folklore generally. I enjoy the book’s meta moments: the siren protagonists of the novel research folklore themselves to gain understanding of their supernatural constitution. The narrator mentions paintings, fairy tales, literary short stories, and internet searches; it seems like a recitation of the author’s own research for the book.

The book is written for, as the author says in her acknowledgments, an audience primarily made up of teenage girls. The protagonist, Kahlen, at 19 years old seems to be the oldest in a sisterhood of sirens. The girls are changed from human to siren when the Ocean answers their pleas to be saved from drowning. The kicker here is that the Ocean is not just a kindly spirit; She has to eat humans in order to survive. In order to continue feeding and sustaining the planet, the Ocean recruits 2-5 human girls for a century of service. The girls, understanding only that they don’t want to die, end up singing ships to their death to feed their mother/employer/warden (as Kahlen puts it) around once a year. It is not stated, but it seems that the sirens’ seductive powers are more important than ever before now that ship travel has been reduced in an age of air travel. The girls make one ship go down in the Bermuda Triangle seemingly without cause, and the news media makes much of the fact that modern-day sailing has too many safeguards to make sinking without a known cause implausible.

The juxtaposition of ancient myth with 24-hour dance clubs in New York City are part of what make modern retellings of fairy tales fun. However, I wish that the difficult ways this juxtaposition would actually play out within the storyworld had been explicitly teased out a bit more. We are not told that the Ocean relies more heavily on her sirens than ever before, but as a reader making my own connections to real-world history I can assume that. It seems harder to keep a secret like the sentience of the Ocean today. Today the entire world can communicate new knowledge, and we have more people on the planet capable of making new discoveries. Humans actively want to figure out how the world works, and we have been making further journeys into the deep recesses of the ocean than ever before. The ocean will not forever remain a mystery in the real world, and it seems implausible that it could in the storyworld either. Extending that, the Ocean’s fear that humans would find a way to stay off of the Ocean entirely, should they learn Her true nature, seems scientifically implausible. Yes, humans have been creating ever-better robots. But the Ocean, as a sentient being, could crash those just as She does ships. Humans then could not harvest food from the Ocean. Given our huge population, losing that enormous food source would (I imagine) mean mass famine. In our own real world, overfishing is already depleting our food supplies; in the storyworld, famine would be unavoidable. Desperate humans, then, would set up some sort of tithe of human lives to the Ocean to gain access to fishing again. But that’s just me spinning on away from the book itself; I enjoyed imagining this world.

There is just enough worldbuilding to cause readers to spend more time thinking about the storyworld than the novel does. None of these musings complicating the Ocean’s logic change the basic plot of the novel. The novel’s focus is on the emotional wranglings of one previously-human girl, not the ramifications of a carnivorous Ocean.

Despite all the worldbuilding’s potential for more, the plot’s emphasis is on a romance. Kahlen wants to fall in love, and she most implausibly does in very little time. However, most of the romance of this book stays at the level of pining. Kahlen and Akinli spend very little time together, and more time apart thinking of each other. We are told that they love each other because both are so very different from others, and both understand the other better than anyone else ever has. Most of the actions taken by every character in the book are motivated, however distantly, by Kahlen’s desire to be with Akinli.

Despite being told that the romance is our goal, most of the page count of the book, and the emotional core of the novel, comes from the interplay between Kahlen and the Ocean. Their relationship is a mix of the one between a parent and child and one between a penitent and her god. Either way, the relationship is one with an unequal power imbalance, and the teen must figure out a way to connect with her mother/god in a way that satisfies them both that they are loved enough. To a lesser degree, Kahlen’s relationships with her sister sirens are also important and developed throughout the course of the novel. I would have to go back and check to see how much of the book passes the part of the Bechdel test in which women talk about a subject other than a man, because talking about Akinli or intentionally not talking about Akinli occupy a lot of space in the novel, but these intra-female relationships are the loving core of Kahlen’s life as a siren.

If you don’t mind the ending being spoiled for you in order to discuss the telling of this tale, read below the cut.

Real life “Pinocchio effect”

Science Daily reports that the “Pinocchio effect” has been confirmed. It has been shown that people’s noses do react strangely when people tell lies. They do not grow longer, however, but rather grow hotter in temperature. This reaction comes from anything that stimulates a stress response in the body, not just lying. As such, the tying of this physiological phenomenon to the fairy tale of “Pinocchio” is merely a strategy on the part of scientists (or science journalists?) to make an audience care about an otherwise seemingly small and unremarkable discovery through the connection to a story with which most people are familiar. This framing did stimulate my interest, admittedly, so I suppose it was not a bad marketing choice.

The abstract provided says:

When a person lies, he or she experiences a “Pinocchio effect”, which is an increase in the temperature around the nose and in the orbital muscle in the inner corner of the eye. In addition, when we perform a considerable mental effort our face temperature drops, and when we have an anxiety attack our face temperature rises, according to a pioneering study that has introduced new applications of thermography.

Work Cited:

University of Granada. “‘Pinocchio effect’ confirmed: When you lie, your nose temperature rises.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 December 2012. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121203081834.htm>.

Pinocchio, the Washington Post fact-checker

A few weeks ago I saw an article proclaiming that a public statement had received a “three Pinocchios” rating. Intrigued, I clicked through and discovered a phenomenon I do not remember seeing before the 2016 election, with its “alternative facts” and “fake news.” The Washington Post has begun grading statements by elected officials according to their degree of falsehood, using a cute image of Pinocchio (click here to see). The news organization does not use a series of images with increasingly long noses to indicate worse falsehoods, but rather this image repeated 1-4 times. They also make use of a “Geppetto checkmark” for truths and an upside-down Pinocchio image for “flip-flops” on positions.

The linking of the titular character from an Italian children’s novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, to lying comes straight from the book. The memorable visual of the growing nose was of course popularized in America by Walt Disney Company’s 1940 film version of the story.

The reference to Pinocchio here works precisely because of its connection to children’s literature. Everyone in the audience has had to learn not to lie, and the story of a young boy learning not to tell falsehoods highlights the fact that this is (at least constructed as) a simple task that young children can master. Facts are facts. “Alternative facts,” “fake news,” and anything “not intended to be a factual statement” are lies, pure and simple. The Pinocchio rating is The Washington Post‘s way of bolstering the public’s confidence in traditional news media.

The site’s clear statement of their criteria for judgment goes a long way toward building their credibility. They judge prepared statements more harshly than statements made off-the-cuff, and both of those are mitigated if the speaker later recants or qualifies any honest mistakes. The rating scale is, in brief, 1 Pinocchio) mostly true, 2 Pinocchios) significant omissions or exaggerations meant to mislead, 3 Pinocchios) factual error or interpretations grossly out of context, and 4 Pinocchios) “whoppers.” They acknowledge that these can be subjective and that they strive to explain any fence-straddlers.

An example of the Pinocchio rating scale comes in the article “Trump’s facile claim that his refugee policy is similar to Obama’s in 2011,” which states within that “The Pinocchio rating has been updated in light of new information.” The story now has a 3-Pinocchio rating.

Since this discovery, I have discovered several news articles using “Pinocchio” references to describe Donald Trump or other public figures related to him:

• “VP Mike Pence pulls a Pinocchio about his record on gay ‘cures’ and HIV”
• “Pinocchio Junior” begins, “When I turned to the op-ed page and saw the picture of President Trump I thought Pinocchio. Then I read his (Sen. Mitch McConnell’s) blather today and I thought Pinocchio Junior.”
• “President Pinocchio addresses Congress” says, in part, “[…]it was no more than a Pinocchio scam with President Trump reading the words of polished writers, White House Geppettos.”
• “Like Pinocchio’s nose, Trump’s lies keep growing”
• And of course, there is a Washington Post Fact Checker compilation: “All of Donald Trump’s Four-Pinocchio ratings, in one place.”

The fairy-tale reference is, of course, one that every reader should understand and connect to. The editors making these headlines as well as the Pinocchio scale understand that most Americans in their audience will understand the connection between Pinocchio and the lesson that lying leads to negative consequences. The implication here is that our elected officials have made such a habit of lying that they are now equated with the bad habit. “Pinocchio” is an adequate enough nickname for readers to understand who is under discussion. And that, we understand, makes the 70-year-old President as ripe for chastisement as a boy so young he was very recently an inanimate puppet.