Katherine Langrish's Blog, page 14

Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #3: THE PRINCESS IN ARMOUR, or Iliane of the Golden Tresses

This wonderful Romanian fairy tale plays all kinds of deliberate tricks with sexuality and gender stereotypes. It was collected (and perhaps enhanced, who knows?) by the Romanian folkorist Petre Ispirescu and was rendered into French by Jules Brun in 'Sept Contes Roumaines' (1892) with a commentary by folklorist Leo Bachelin.  

The title varies from translation to translation. Jules Brun calls the tale ‘Jouvencelle, Jouvenceau' or ‘Young Woman, Young Man’ - which sounds neater in French than it does in English. Translating Brun’s story for ‘The Violet Fairy Book’, Andrew Lang’s wife Leonora Blanche Alleyne renamed it ‘The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy’ (and added a few passages to emphasise the heroine's femininity). A translation directly from Romanian by Julia Collier Harris and Rea Ipcar in "The Foundling Prince and Other Tales" (Houghton Mifflin 1917), gives the title as ‘The Princess Who Would Be A Prince: or Iliane of the Golden Tresses’. All of these titles sound a little cumbersome in English, so I've gone out on a limb and called it 'The Princess in Armour', but kept the subtitle which refers to the second heroine of the story - for there are two!

The first heroine is an unnamed warrior princess who quite literally becomes the Romanian sun-hero, Fet-Frumos (Beautiful Son: Făt-Frumos in Romanian) - a warrior of immense chivalry and prowess. Besides his mythic origins, Fet-Frumos is the Prince Charming of Romanian fairy stories and the lover of Ileana Simziana: Iliane of the Golden Hair. Leo Bachelin considers Iliane to be the personification of youth and springtime, dawn and twilight; while he describes the warrior-girl heroine of this story as a sort of androgynous Apollo whose powers of light are bound to put shadows to flight. After all, her/his horse is called Sunray...
In the original Romanian, the heroic princess has to fight a folkloric creature called a Știmă. (T wo of them, in fact.) All the translations I've mentioned above render this word as 'genie', so I've followed them - but it almost certainly gives the wrong impression, especially if Disney's Aladdin comes to mind, since a Știmă seems to be a kind of dangerous nature spirit, who often has a connection with water: this may explain why the one which holds Iliane prisoner lives in 'the swamps of the sea.'  

The version below is my translation from Brun's 'Sept Contes Roumaines'. The subtitle 'Iliane of the Golden Tresses' is important because Iliane is another significant personage in Romanian folk tales and mythology. According to this article in The Journal of Romanian Linguistics and Culture she is "the heroine of numerous songs, carols, and fairy tales; the most beautiful of all fairies, their queen, so beautiful that ‘one could look at the sun but not at her’. Her epithets are ‘the beautiful’, the moon fairy, ‘lady of the flowers’, protector of the wild animals and the forests..." 

Given all this, the final twist at the end of the story might be taken any number of ways, but to my mind it is a consciously ironic comment on the power of masculinity. 


There was once an emperor – oh yes, there was; if he hadn’t existed, how could I tell you about him? Very well then, there was once an All-Powerful Emperor. Victory after victory, he extended his empire over the whole wide earth, as far as to the place where the devil suckles his children! And he forced each of the emperors whom he subjugated to send him one of their sons to serve him for ten years.

Now, on the very edge of the borders of his realm, one last emperor stood against him. Year after year this emperor defended his realm and people until, growing old at last and losing his strength, he realised he too would have to submit.

But how was he going to to obey the command of the All-Powerful Emperor and send a son to serve him? He had no sons, only three daughters. How he worried! If he couldn't send a son, the Emperor would think him a rebel! He didn’t talk about it, but he imagined himself and his daughters thrown out of their lands and dying in misery and distress.

The sadness shadowing his face threw black sorrow on the white souls of his three daughters. Not knowing the cause, they tried their best to brighten up their old father, but nothing worked. So the eldest took her courage in both hands. “What troubles you, father? Is it something we’ve done? Have your subjects turned against you? Please tell us what is poisoning your old age. To blot out the least of your troubles we would shed our blood. You’re our life, you know that! We will never fail you.”   
“Ah, I know that’s true, you three have never disobeyed me; but you can’t help me, my dear children. Little girls! Nothing but girls, alas! Only a boy could get me out of the trouble I’m in. My sweethearts, from childhood on, all you’ve ever learned to handle are spindles and needles: spinning and embroidery are all the tasks you know. Only a hero can save me now – a young man who can whirl a heavy weapon – brandish a sword – gallop at the foe like a dragon at lions!”
His daughters cried out, “What are you hiding from us? Speak!” They threw themselves on their knees before him and the emperor gave in. “My children, this is why I’m sad. When I was young, no one dared touch my empire, but the years have frozen my blood and drunk my strength. My enemies are no longer afraid of me: foreign soldiers will set fire to my roofs and water their horses at my wells. There’s nothing to be done, I must submit to the All-Powerful Emperor, as all other emperors on earth have done before me. But he makes all his vassals send the best of their sons to serve ten years in his court, and I have no sons, only three daughters.”
“So what? I’ll go!” cried the eldest, “I’ll save you!”
“No, poor child, it’s useless!”
“Father, one thing is sure, you shall never be ashamed of me. Am I not a princess, and daughter of an emperor?”
“Very well. Get yourself ready and you may try.”
The gallant girl jumped for joy and rushed to prepare for her journey. She turned coffers upside down and emptied chests, packing enough gold-embroidered garments and fine jewels for a year, with all kinds of provisions. She took the most spirited horse from the royal stables, a splendid steed with fiery eyes, silken mane and silver coat. 
When her father saw her armed and mounted, making her horse prance in the courtyard, he gave her the best advice, telling her all kinds of tricks to disguise her true sex and warning her against gossip and indiscretions so that everyone would believe she was a young prince chosen for an important mission. Finally he said, “Go with God, my daughter, and keep my advice tucked safely between your two ears.”
Horse and rider leaped away. The princess’s armour shone like a flash of lightning in the eyes of the stunned guards: she split the wind and was gone in the blink of an eye. And if she hadn’t slowed down for her retinue of boyards and servants, they would have been lost, unable to catch up.  But although she didn’t know it, her father the emperor – who was a magician – wished to test her. Hurrying ahead of her, he threw a copper bridge over the way, changed himself into a wolf with fiery eyes, and crouched under the arch. As his daughter came by, the wolf leaped howling from under the bridge, teeth gnashing and rushed at her, as if to tear her apart.
The poor girl’s heart leaped with fright, the horse gave an enormous bound – and in panic she wrenched him around, spurred him away and didn’t stop till she was back at her father’s palace. 
The old emperor had got back before her. He came to meet her at the gate and shaking his head sadly, welcomed her with these words, “Didn’t I tell you, my little one, flies can’t make honey?”
“Alas, father, how was I to know that on my way to serve an emperor I would have to fight  raging wild beasts?”
“There, stay by the fireside with your needle, and may God have pity on me! He alone can spare me from shame.”
Now the second princess came to ask permission to attempt the adventure, swearing that she would stop at nothing to see it through. She begged  so hard that her father let her have her way, and off she went, all armed, followed by her baggage train. But she too met the wolf barring the way at the copper bridge, and returned discomfited just like her older sister. The old emperor received her in the same way in front of the gate and said sadly,  “Didn’t I say to you, little one, not every bird can be caught?”
"But father, this wolf was really scary. He opened his jaws so wide he could have swallowed me in one gulp, and his eyes flashed rays of lightning as if to destroy me on the spot!’”
“Then stay by the fireside, embroider cloth and make bread. May God help me!”
But here comes the youngest daughter: “Father, it’s my turn. Let me too try my luck. Perhaps I shall laugh at the wolf!”
“After what happened to the others? You have a nerve, you baby! How dare you talk about laughing at the wolf? You’re hardly old enough to use a spoon!"
The old emperor did everything he could to dissuade her, but it was no good. “For you, father, I’d chop the devil into pieces – or turn devil myself. I feel sure I’ll succeed, but if God is really against me, at least I’ll come back with no more shame than my sisters.”
Her father continued to hesitate, but his daughter coaxed him so sweetly that he was beaten. “Very well, I shall let you go. How much use it will be, we shall see. At least I shall have a good laugh when I see you coming back, head hanging, and staring down at your pretty little slippers.”
“Laugh if you wish, father, I shall not be dishonoured.”
The first thing the girl decided to do was to go to an old, white-haired boyard for advice – and remembering the stories she’d heard of the deeds of her father when he was young, she thought of his warhorse, which reminded her she needed to pick one for herself. So she went to the stables and looked in every stall, with her nose in the air. The best horses and mares in the empire – not one of them pleased her. Finally, after a long search, she found the famous horse of her father’s youth, a hairless, broken-down old nag lying in the straw. The girl gazed at him in pity, unable to move away. Then the horse spoke:
“How sweetly you look at me! If only you’d seen me as I was on the battlefield, when your father and I won glory together! but now I’m old, no one rides me any more. See how dry my coat is? My old master neglects me, but if someone cared for me properly, I’d be better than the ten best horses in the stable.”
“How should you be cared for?” the young woman asked.  “Sponge me down morning and evening with rainwater, give me barley boiled in new milk, and most important of all, ginger me up with hot cinders.”
“I’ll do it, if you’ll help me in my plans.”  “Mistress, you won’t regret it!” 
The princess did everything the magical horse had asked. On the tenth day, a long shiver ran through his hide. He was glossy as a mirror, fat as butter and agile as a mountain goat. Looking joyfully at the young woman, he kicked up his heels and said, “May God bring you happiness and success, for you’ve given me new life. Tell me your plans! Command, and I obey!”
                The king’s daughter made ready for the journey. Instead of weighing herself down with a year’s provisions like her sisters, she gathered together some plain, loose-fitting boy’s clothes, underwear and food, with a little money in case she needed it. Then she caught her horse and came before her father. “God and his saints protect you, my dear father, and keep you safe till I return!”
“Bon voyage, my child! Just remember my advice: turn to God in every danger. Only he can bring you aid.” The young woman promised, and off she went.

Now, just as he’d done before, the emperor hurried ahead, flung a copper bridge over the way, and waited. But before she got there, the magical horse warned the princess what tricks her father was up to, and told her how to get out of it with honour.
                As soon as she arrived at the copper bridge, the wolf leaped at her – flaming eyes, raging teeth, mouth like an oven, tongue like a firebrand – but the gallant girl spurred her horse and rushed at him, sword flashing – and she would have split him down the middle from nose to tail if he hadn’t recoiled and run away. She wasn’t playing, that girl! Her strength came from God and she was determined to accomplish her task. Then, proud as she was brave, she crossed the bridge. Delighted with her courage, her father took a short cut. At the end of the next day’s march, he threw a silver bridge across the way, turned himself into a lion and lay in wait. But the horse warned his mistress of this trick, too. As soon as she arrived at the silver bridge, out jumped the lion, covered in spiny hair. His teeth were like cutlasses, his claws like knives, and he roared loud enough to uproot forests and make your ears bleed. The princess caught her breath – but she charged the lion, sword raised, and dealt a blow of such force that if he hadn’t twisted aside she would have cut him in quarters. Then she crossed the bridge in a single leap, praising God. 

But her father got ahead of her again. Three days’ march ahead he threw a golden bridge over the way, turned himself into a dragon with twelve heads and hid beneath the arch. When the princess came in sight, the dragon leaped into view. His tail clattered and coiled, smoke billowed from his fiery jaws, and his twelve tongues waggled and wove about, covered in bristles. The young woman’s heart nearly failed, but the horse urged her on: she raised her sword, spurred forwards and fell upon the dragon. They fought fiercely for an hour until, striking sideways with all her force, she slashed off one of the monster’s heads. He roared to crack the sky, did three somersaults and disintegrated in front of her, taking on human shape. 
Even though the princess had been warned, she could scarcely believe it was her own father, but he embraced and kissed her, saying, “Now I see that you are as brave as the bravest! And you’ve picked the right horse; without him you would have fared like your sisters. Now I believe you will fulfil your mission. Remember my advice, and above all, listen to the horse you’ve chosen.” She knelt for his blessing and they parted.
On she went till she came to the mountains that hold up the roof of the world. Here she came across two genies who’d been fighting to the death for two years, neither one of them managing to overcome the other. Assuming her to be a young hero riding out on adventure, one of them cried, “Hey, Fet-frumos, help me! And I’ll give you a horn which can be heard for a distance of three days journey!”
The other shouted, “No  – help me, and I’ll give you my precious horse Sunray!”
The princess quickly consulted her own horse. “Take the last offer,” he advised. “Sunray is my younger brother, and even wiser and more active than myself.” So the princess hurled herself at the other genie and split him in half from the skull to the belly-button.  
The genie she’d rescued thanked and embraced her (noticing nothing strange), and together they went to his house so that he could give her Sunray as he’d promised. Here the genie’s mother greeted them, delirious with joy to see her son safe and sound. Hardly knowing how to thank him, she kissed the young champion – and immediately suspected something. Still, she showed ‘him’ to the best chamber – but the princess insisted on tending to her horse first. And in the stables, the horse told her everything she needed to know.
For the old woman was brewing up mischief. She whispered to her son that this handsome young fellow was really a young woman – and just the sort to make him an excellent wife. The genie didn’t believe her. Never! Ridiculous! No mere woman could handle a sword like that. But his mother persisted, and promised to prove it. That evening, at the head of each bed, she placed a magnificent bunch of flowers, enchanted so that it would wither overnight at a man’s bedside, but stay fresh at a woman’s. 
During the night, the young woman got up (as the horse had advised), tiptoed into the genie’s bedroom, lifted the already-withered bunch of flowers, and slipped her own still-fresh one into its place, knowing that its beauty would soon fade. She went back to her room, lay down and slept. Early next morning the old woman rushed to her son’s room and found the flowers withered, as she’d expected. Next she went to the girl’s room, and was shocked to find those flowers equally faded. But she still couldn’t believe her guest was a boy.
“Can’t you see?” she said to her son. “What man has so graceful a figure? That blonde hair, those lips as red as cherries, those bright eyes, those delicate wrists and feet? This simply has to be a young noblewoman dressed up in armour!”
So they dreamed up a second test. Next morning the genie took his young friend’s arm and suggested a walk in the garden. He showed off all his flowerbeds, and invited ‘him’ to pick any or all of them. But warned by the horse, and suspecting a trick, the king’s daughter demanded roughly why they were idly discussing flowers, when there was man’s business to be done – the stables to visit, horses to tend? So the genie swore to his mother that their guest was certainly a boy. Yet still his mother obstinately judged otherwise. 
For the last test, the genie showed the girl into his armoury, full of rows of scimitars, bayonets, maces and sabres – some plain and simple, others decorated with jewels – and invited her to choose one. The princess looked at them, carefully testing the points and edges. Then like a practised warrior, she thrust into her belt an old rusty Damascus blade, curved like a crescent, and told the genie she was leaving and it was time to give her Sunray. Seeing her choice of weapon, the old woman despaired of ever learning the truth, though she was sure in her own mind of what she’d told her son – that this was a clever and tricky girl. But they had to do as she wished. They went to the stables and gave her the horse, Sunray.

The emperor’s daughter leaped on Sunray’s back and pressed him to run faster and faster. Galloping alongside, her father’s old horse said to her, “Mistress, now you must go on with my young brother. Trust him as you do me. He is like myself, but younger and more vigorous. Sunray can show you what to do in difficult times.” Then with tears in her eyes the girl dismissed her old horse, the horse of her father’s youth.
She journeyed on, when all of a sudden she saw a bright curl of golden hair lying in the road. Pulling Sunray to a halt, she asked if she should pick it up or leave it. Sunray answered, “If you take it you’ll be sorry, but if you don’t take it you’ll still be sorry: so take it.” She picked it up, stuck it into the collar of her tunic and rode on. They went by mountains and valleys, through dark forests and sunny meadows, they passed over springs of fresh water, they came to the court of the All-Powerful Emperor, where the sons of other emperors served him like pages. The Emperor was delighted to see this spirited young prince and soon appointed him as a personal companion. This made the other pages jealous. Spotting the lock of shining golden heir tucked into the collar of his shirt, they went to the emperor and told him that their new companion had been boasting that he knew where Iliane lived, golden Iliane, beautiful Iliane of that song,
Tresses of gold,The fields grow green,The roses blossom…
and that he’d shown them a lock of her golden hair. As soon as he heard that, the All-Powerful Emperor ordered the girl to be called before him. “Fet-Frumos, you’ve deceived me. Why did you hide from me that you know Iliane of the Golden Hair? How did you steal that curl? Bring her to me, or your head will roll where your feet are now. I have spoken.”
All the poor young woman could do was bow and retreat, but when Sunray learned what had happened, he said, “Don’t worry! A genie has kidnapped Iliane, whose golden hair you picked up on the road, and imprisoned her in the Swamps of the Sea. She refuses to marry her kidnapper unless he can round up her stud of mares, which is a dangerous thing to do. Go back to the All-Powerful Emperor and say you need twenty ships, and a cargo of precious goods to put in them. ’ The girl went straight to the emperor. “Son,” said the emperor, “you shall have all of it! But bring me Iliane of the golden hair.”
Well, neither wind nor waves delayed them. After a voyage of seven weeks to the Swamps of the Sea, they came to the coast of a beautiful island all covered in revolving palaces, castles which turned around by themselves so as always to face the sun. The emperor’s daughter disembarked, and taking some bejewelled slippers she rode towards the castles on Sunray, where three of the genie’s eunuchs who were guarding Iliane, came to meet her. (The genie was away from home trying to round up Iliane’s mares, leaving only his old mother in charge.) The girl told them she was a merchant who had lost his way in the sea marshes, and had luxury goods to sell. 
Now looking from her window, Iliane had spotted the handsome merchant already. Her heart gave a sudden thump at the sight of him, and she persuaded the genie’s mother to let her go down and try on the wonderful slippers. They fitted perfectly, and when the youth told her that his ships held even finer and more precious things, she went on board. While she was looking at all the enchanting merchandise (and exchanging glances with the young merchant) she didn’t notice the shore receding and the sea spreading out over the swamps so far, so far, that soon there was no sign on the horizon of the island and the coast. A good wind blew, the ships flew like seabirds, and beautiful Iliane of the golden hair found herself in the middle of the sea, but did she care? Not when she lifted her eyes to the face of the young merchant who had delivered her from prison. 
Nearly had they reached the opposite shore when they saw the genie’s mother rushing after them. Wading over the blue billows, hopping from wave to wave, one foot in the air and the other on the splashing foam, she was almost on their heels, flames streaming from her mouth. The instant the ship touched land they leaped ahore, and the emperor’s daughter threw Iliane up on to Sunray’s back. She leaped up herself, told Iliane to hold to her waist – and away they galloped with the old crone’s breath hot on their shoulders. “I’m scorching!” Iliane cried. 
So the emperor's daughter leaned down to the horse and asked him what to do; and Sunray answered, “Reach into my left ear, pull out the sharp stone you’ll find there and throw it behind you!”
The emperor’s daughter did just that. Then all three of them began to race like a hurricane, while behind them in one stroke a rocky mountain rose up to touch the sky. But the genie’s mother flung herself at it, hoisting herself from rock to rock. Look out! Beware! 
Twisting around, Ilaine saw her coming. In fright she buried her head in the young merchant’s neck, covering it with kisses and crying out that they would be overtaken. Again the girl bent over the horse’s neck and asked him what to do, for the flames jetting from the witch’s mouth were burning their waists. 
“Reach into my right ear, pull out the brush you’ll find there and throw it behind you!”
The emperor’s daughter did just that. Then they ran harder than ever, while behind them sprang up a vast, dark forest, too thick for even the tinest animal to thread its way through. But the crone swung herself through the trees, crushing them, clutching their branches in a burning grip, shoving and shaking their trunks, and after them she came, onwards, onwards, whirling like a tornado. 
Iliane saw her coming and, her head buried in the merchant’s neck which in her terror she was now both kissing and biting, she sobbed out her fear of being caught, which was surely now a certainty.
For the last time the girl bent over the horse's neck and asked him what they should do, for the crone was spitting out a column of fire and frizzling the golden hair on their heads. And Iliane was writhing in pain, and Sunray gasped, “Quick, take the ring from Iliane’s finger and throw it behind you!” And this time, up shot a stone tower, smooth as ivory, strong as steel, bright as a mirror, tall enough to crack the sky. 
Raging and cursing, the genie’s mother gathered her strength, bent like a bow, and shot herself up to the top of the tower; but she fell through the hole of the ring, which formed the tower’s turret, and couldn’t climb out again; all she could do was cling with her claws to the niches and crannies, with no hope of climbing up or getting out. She did everything she could, she shot out flames for a distance of three hours travel, hoping to grill the fugitives; but barely a spark fell at the tower’s foot where the two lovers were snuggled. And the witch kept puffing out fiery sparks and set fire to the countryside for leagues around, for she could hear her enemies laughing and hugging and taunting her, till in her final rage she crumbled to bits and died. Then the tower bowed gently down to the handsome young merchant, who put his finger through the ring as Sunray had told him, and the high tower vanished as if it had never been there, and there was the handsome girl’s finger with the ring around it. And off they darted like mountain eagles till they came to the imperial court.
The All–Powerful Emperor received Iliane with great respect. He could hardly contain his joy; he fell in love with her at first glance,and decided to marry her. But Iliane was depressed and saddened; she longed to be like other girls who could do as they wished. Why did her fate seem aways to be in the hands of those she disliked – genie or emperor – while her heart was given to the handsome young merchant of the island? 
She replied, “Glorious emperor, may you rule your people in honour forever! Alas, I am forbidden even to dream of marriage until someone rounds up my herd of mares and their fierce stallion.”
At this, the All-Powerful Emperor called the warlike girl and gave the order, “Fet-frumos, fetch me this herd of mares, along with their stallion. If you don’t, I will cut off your head.”
“Dread emperor, I kiss your hands. You have put my head in danger already, sending me on a dangerous task, and now you’re giving me another. I see plenty of valiant sons of emperors here, with nothing to do; it would be fairer to send someone else on this errand. What will become of me, where will I find this herd of mares you order me to fetch?”
“How should I know? Ransack heaven and earth if you must, but I’m telling you to do it, and don’t dare to utter a word!”
The girl bowed. Off she went to tell Sunray everything, and the wise horse answered, “Find me nine buffalo hides, cover them in pitch, spread them over my coat and don’t be afraid, for with God’s help you will succeed in this mission; but believe me, mistress, in the end he’s going to play you false.”

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She did just what the horse had told her and the pair of them set out. It was a long, hard journey, but at last they came to the region where Iliane’s herd of mares was to be found. Here wandered the genie who had stolen Iliane. He thought she was still in his power under strong guard, but since he had no idea how to perform the task she’d set him he spent his time went running here and there after Iliane’s horses, not knowing what saint to call upon for help and generally exhausting himself. When the heroic girl told him that Iliane was gone from the revolving palace and that his mother had died of spite, the genie became fire and flame and flung himself upon her. They fought together till the ground shook and the noise terrified the birds and beasts for twenty leagues around. Finally, with a mighty effort, the girl chopped off her enemy’s head, left the carcase to the crows and magpies, and found the plain where the mares were running. 
Sunray now told his mistress to climb a tree and watch what happened. Armoured in the nine buffalo hides, the splendid horse whinnied three times and the whole herd of mares came running to him with their stallion – who was white with foam and roaring in anger. The stallion leapt at Sunray, but with each bite he tore away only a mouthful of buffalo hide, while every time Sunray bit him, he tore away a mouthful of flesh. When the stallion sank down, bleeding and conquered, Sunray hadn’t suffered a scratch, but his buffalo-hide armour hung in tatters. Then the emperor’s daughter came down from her tree, mounted him and led the herd away to the All-Powerful Emperor’s court, where Iliane came and called all of the mares to her by their names. And as soon as he heard her voice, the wounded stallion was healed and looked as fine as he had before, without even the tiniest scar.
Iliane now told the All-Powerful Emperor he must have her mares milked, so that he and she could be betrothed by bathing in their milk. Yet who could do this? The mares kicked fiercely at anyone who came near; even a single kick could cave in your chest, and no one could touch them. The Emperor ordered ‘Fet-Frumos’ to get on with it and do the job. 
The emperor’s daughter felt a darkness in her soul. Was she always to be given the hardest tasks? She would collapse under the strain if this went on! Fervently she prayed God to help her, and since she was pure in both body and soul, her prayer was answered. It began to rain – the sort of rain that comes down in buckets. Water rose as high as the mares’ knees, froze to ice as hard as stone and locked their legs in place. The girl thanked God for this miracle and began milking the mares as if she had been doing so all her life.
But by now the All-Powerful Emperor was almost dying of love for Iliane. He kept staring at her the way a child stares at a tree covered in ripe cherries, but she used all kinds of tricks to put off the day of their marriage. Finally running out of ideas, she said, “Gracious emperor, you have granted my wishes, but I would like one little thing more, after which we shall be married. Get me the flask of holy water which is kept in a little chapel beyond the river Jordan. Then I will become your wife.” 
The All-Powerful Emperor summoned Iliane’s rescuer and said, “Go, Fet-Frumos, and don’t come back without the flask of holy water, or I will cut off your head.”
The young woman withdrew with a heavy heart, but when Sunray heard what had happened he said, “Dear mistress, here is the last and hardest of your tasks. Keep up your faith in God! Time is nearly up for this wicked and abusive emperor. The flask of holy water stands on an altar in a little chapel guarded by nuns, who sleep neither night nor day. However, from time to time a hermit visits them, to instruct them in holy things. A single nun remains on guard while they listen to his words, so if we can pick that very moment, all will be well. If not, we’ll have plenty of time to regret it.” 
Away they rode. They passed over Jordan river and came to the chapel just moments after the hermit had arrived and called the nuns to chapter. A single nun remained on guard, but the hermit’s lesson went on for so long that, tired out by the endless watch, she lay down over the threshold and went to sleep. 
Soft as a cat, the emperor’s daughter stepped over the the sleeping nun. Stealthily she lifted up the holy flask, leaped on her horse and galloped away! The clatter of Sunray’s hoofs woke the nun. She saw the flask was gone and began to wail and cry. The other nuns came rushing. Seeing the rider disappearing at top speed and realising there was nothing to be done, the hermit fell on his knees and called down a curse upon the thief: “Thrice holy Lord, grant that the wretched knave who has stolen the holy flask of thy baptismal water may be punished! If it is a man, may he become a woman! – or it is a woman, may she become a man!”
But see how the hermit’s prayer was answered! When the emperor’s daughter suddenly felt herself a gallant boy in both body and soul, just as she had always seemed, she was neither astonished nor upset. In fact, the thoughts of this new he flew straight to Iliane… Delighted with the transformation, hardier and bolder than ever, the youngster returned to the All Powerful Emperor’s court and handing the flask over, said, “Mighty emperor, I salute you. I have completed all the tasks you set me; I hope this will be the last of them. Be happy then, and reign in peace, as you hope to receive mercy from our Lord!”
“Fet-frumos, I am pleased with your services! After my death you shall succeed me on the throne, as up till now I have had no heir. But if God gives me a son, you shall be his right hand,” the Emperor replied. 
But Iliane Goldenhair was very angry that this last wish of hers had been fulfilled. She decided to take revenge on the Emperor for always handing the hardest tasks to the invincible young hero she loved. She thought that if her royal admirer was sincere he ought to have fetched the flask of holy water himself. So she ordered a bath of her mares’ milk to be heated, and asked the All-Powerful Emperor to bathe in it with her – he agreed with delight. Once they were in the bath together, she had the stallion from her herd brought in to blow cool air on them. At her signal, the stallion blew cool air upon Iliane through one nostril – and through the other he blew a blast of red-hot air at the All-Powerful Emperor. It was so fierce it charred him to the bone, and he fell back dead. 
               There was great confusion in the land at the strange death of the All-Powerful Emperor! From all sides they assembled, crowds ran to witness his magnificent funeral. After that, Iliane said to the youth, 
 “You brought me here, Fet-Frumos: you rounded up my herd of mares with their stallion and all the rest, you killed the genie, and the witch his mother, you brought me the flask of holy water from beyond the Jordan. My life and love belong to you. Be my husband! Let us bathe together and marry!"
“Yes, I’ll marry you, because I love you and you love me,” the youth answered in a voice just as soft as when he was a girl, “but know that in our house, the cock will crow and not the hen…” And guess what? Just because he was a man now, he added, “I’ll have my way!” So they were married, and reigned with justice and in the fear of God, protecting the poor, maltreating no one, and if they haven’t died yet, he and Iliane are reigning still.

And I was there at the wedding, indeed I was! I stood around gaping at all of the parties, for nobody dreamed of offering me a chair. So what did I do?
I sat on my saddle like any old farmer And I told you the story of the princess in armour.



More about fairy tales and folklore in my book "Seven Miles of Steel Thistles" available from Amazon here and here.



Picture credits:The Princess Charges the Lion, by H J Ford, illustration for The Violet Fairy Book
The Valkyrie Lagerta, by Morris Meredith Williams, 1913

Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #2: THE THREE SISTERS

 

THE THREE SISTERS

This haunting story is a Romany tale collected and translated by John Sampson (1862 – 1931). Sampson was a self-taught linguist, scholar and printer, and librarian of University College, Liverpool. On a walking tour near Bala in the late 1900s he encountered and was befriended by members of the Wood clan, descendents of the eighteenth century ‘King of the Gypsies’ Abram Wood, and speakers of Welsh-Romani: ‘a quite pure, inflected Romani dialect’ which became his principal study. Edward’s brother Matthew, and his four sons, told Sampson many folktales some of which were published by the Gypsy Lore Society.
“The Three Sisters” is a tale bathed in a sinister half-light as one after another, the sisters journey to the land ‘where the devil never wound his horn and the cock never crew,’ and white stones glimmer in an eternal dusk. The old woman in the red cloak and her brother in the red jerkin are clearly powerful fairies – red is a dangerous, fairy colour – and the gate leading to the hill, through which each has to pass, suggests it is an entrance to the Otherworld. At the end of the story, the youngest sister triumphs because she has, significantly, taken the initiative from the fairy man by speaking to him first, which enables her to ignore the cries of the white stones. She then supplants the woman in the red cloak as ruler of the fairy kingdom but still takes care to address her as 'good aunt': she has learned that you shouldn't offend the fair folk.
This tale and others can be found in  “XXI Welsh Gypsy Tales” by John Sampson, (Gregynog Press, 1933)

There was a cottage, and there lived in this cottage an old man and his wife. They had three children, and these children were three little sisters. And they dwelt there summer after summer until their father and mother died.

            And two summers after their father and mother died, there came to the cottage a little old woman who wore a red cloak. And she went to the door and begged for a cup of tea. “No,” said the eldest sister, “we have not enough for ourselves.” “I will bind thy head and thine eyes, if I bind not thy whole body,” said the crone to her. With that she departed.

            And now these three sisters grew poor. And one day the eldest sister said to the two others, “I am going to seek work somewhere. And do you three stay here to look after the house. But if ye see the spring dried up and blood in the ladle, some evil has befallen me. Come then, one of you, in search of me.” And so in the morning when they arose they used to look for the tokens of which their elder sister had spoken.

            Let us leave the two younger sisters for a while and follow the eldest one. 

            The eldest sister journeyed to where the devil never wond his horn and the cock never crew. Night fell. Presently she saw a little man in a red jerkin. This little red-jerkined fellow was brother to the old woman of the red cloak. And before the girl asked aught of him, he put a question to her. “Art thou seeking work?” “Yes,” replied the girl. 

            Little Red Jerkin gave her no hint of the trial that lay before her. He opened a gate. “Go up there and thou wilt get work!”

And up she climbed. There were little white stones all the way up the hill. “Stop and look!” cried one white stone. The girl stopped and looked at the stone. She was bewitched into a trance and transformed into a white pebble. Thus did old Red Cloak bind her head and her eyes with a spell. And now she has bound her whole body.

Let us leave her there and return to the two younger sisters. 

One morning the second sister arose and ran to the door to look. She opened the door and there was the spring dried up and blood in the ladle. Horror overwhelmed her when she beheld these things. “Some evil has befallen my sister,” she cried to the youngest girl. Then the spring flowed and the ladle was bright again. Now she, in her turn, said to her younger sister, “If thou seest the spring dried up and blood in the spoon, some misfortune has overtaken me. Come then and seek for me.”

Let us leave the youngest girl now and follow her who set out in search of the eldest sister. 

She journeyed to where the devil never blew his horn and the cock never crew, until she met this same man in the red jerkin.  And before she could utter a word to him, Red Jerkin spoke. “Art thou looking for work?” asked he. “No,” answered the girl, “I am looking for my sister.” “Thy sister is up yonder; she has found work, and is doing well.”

The gate was opened and the girl climbed the hill. “Stop!” cried one white stone. The girl did not pause, but went straight on. “Look!” called another stone. The girl went on. “Lo! here is thy sister,” cried a third stone. She stood still and looked around when she heard this news about her sister. And she was bewitched into a magic trance and transformed into a white pebble. 

Let us return now to the youngest sister who was at home. 

She arose one morning and went to the door and opened it. There was no water in the spring; it was dried up. There was blood in the ladle! Then the youngest sister burst into tears. 

But she had more spirit than the other two. She knew not where they had gone, she knew not where to seek them. So, after making fast the door, she took the road on which she had seen her sisters set out. 

And she journeyed to where the devil never wound his horn and the cok never crew, until she met the little fellow in the red jerkin. Before he could open his mouth, the youngest sister spoke to him. She got in the first word. She asked him about work. “Yes, there is work for thee.” His heart was well-nigh broken, because the maiden had got in the first word.

He opened the gate and the girl climbed the hill. As she climbed, one white stone called to her, “Stop!” The girl went on. “Look!” cried a second stone. “This is the place!” cried a third stone. The maiden was quite fearless. She paid no heed to them. “Lo! here are thy two sisters,” cried yet another stone. 

“Kiss them, then,” quoth she. And on she sped until there were no more stones and she reached the little old woman in the red cloak.

When Red Cloak saw the girl she fell on her knees. “Hast thou found me then, little lady?” “I have,” quoth the little lady.

And now, lo and behold! all that slumbrous spell was broken. And all these white stones were restored to their former shapes. It was this maiden who had broken the whole enchantment: the dear God had put in into her heart to achieve all this and to have no fear. 

And she went to her two sisters and led them up to the old woman in the red cloak. “Here are my tow sisters,” said she. “I know them,” answered Red Cloak. “but it is thou who art mistress here now. All is left in thy hands. Do as thou wilt.” “I thank thee, good aunt.”

Red Cloak showed the youngest sister where all the treasure was. Then the girl gave her two sisters a bagful each, and charged them to send her word if any mischance should ever again befall them. And they both fell on their knees before their youngest sister. They were escorted home.

And she became the greatest lady in all that land, far and wide, and she married Red Jerkin. And they live there happily to this day.




More on fairy tales and folklore in my book "Seven Miles of Steel Thistles" available  here and here.

Picture credits:Details from 'The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke' by Richard Dadd

Strong Fairy Tale heroines #1: SIMON AND MARGARET

SIMON AND MARGARET

This tale was told in the 1880s by Gaelic-speaking Michael Faherty of Renvyle in Connemara, Co Galway to William Hartpole Lecky, who wrote it down verbatim; it was then translated by Irish poet William Larminie for his collection ‘West-Irish Folk Tales (1893). Larminie was a careful and responsible collector who took down most of his tales in person. He not only names his sources but gives brief descriptions of them: 'Michael Faherty,' he says, 'was when I first made his acquaintance, a lad of about seventeen. He ... lived with his uncle, who had, or has still, a small holding... and who was also a pilot and repairer of boats.' Unlike many 19th century collectors Larminie did not attempt to improve or embellish the stories he was told; he was so conscientious that his collection even includes one unfinished tale, with a note to explain that the storyteller had forgotten the ending!

In this complete tale, the heroine Margaret follows her married lover Simon to sea, only to be cast overboard like Jonah when the ship is threatened by a female sea serpent with a great dislike of the Irish... It's easy to inagine this story being told aloud: deadpan and deceptively naïve, with elisions, sudden surprises and touches of sly humour. We hear how the two lovers are reunited, how the level-headed Margaret saves Simon by fighting the giant of the White Doon, and how in spite of his attempt to take credit for the victory, he's forced to admit that she was the one who did it. 
Long ago there was a king’s son called Simon, and he came in a ship from the east to Eire. In the place where he came to harbour he met with a woman whose name was Margaret, and she fell in love with him. And she asked him if he would take her with him on the ship. He said he would not take her, that he had no busines with her, “for I am married already,” said he.  But the day he was going to sea she followed him to the ship, and such a beautiful woman was she, that he said to himself that he would not put her out of the ship, “but before I go further I must get beef.” He returned back and got the beef. He took the woman and the beef to the ship and ordered the sailors to make everything ready that they might be sailing on the sea.

            They were not long from land when they saw a great bulk making towards them, and it seemed to them that it was more like a serpent than anything else whatever. And it was not long before the serpent cried out, “Throw me the Irish person you have on board.”

            “We have no Irish person in the ship,” said the king’s son, “for it is foreign people we are; but we have meat we took from Eire, and, if you wish, we will give you that.”

            “Give it to me,” said the serpent, “and everything else you took from Eire.”

            He threw out a quarter of the beef, and the serpent went away that day, and on the morrow morning she came again, and they threw out another quarter, and one every day till the meat was gone. And next day the serpent came again, and she cried out to the king’s son, “Throw the Irish flesh out to me.”

            “I have no more flesh,” said the prince.

            “If you have no flesh, you have an Irish person,” said the serpent, “and don’t be telling your lies to me any longer. I knew from the beginning you had an Irish person in the ship, and unless you throw her out to me, and quickly, I will eat up yourself and your men.”

            Margaret came up, and no sooner did the serpent see her than she opened her mouth, and put on an appearance as if she were going to swallow the ship.



            
 “I will not be guilty of the death of you all,” said Margaret; “get me a boat, and if I go far safe it is better, and if I do not, I had rather I perished than the whole of us.”

            “What shall we do to save you?” said Simon.

            “You can do nothing better than put me in the boat,” said she, “and lower me on the the sea, and leave me to the will of God.”

            As soon as she got on the sea, no sooner did the serpent see her than she desired to swallow her, but before she reached as far as her, a billow of the sea rose between them, and left herself and the boat on dry land. She saw not a house in sight she could go to. “Now,” she said, “I am as unfortunate as ever I was. This is no place for me to be!” She arose and began to walk, and after a long while she saw a house a good way from her. “I am not as unfortunate as I thought,” said she. “Perhaps I shall get lodging in that house tonight.” She went in, and there was no one in it but an old woman who was getting her supper ready. “I am asking for lodging till morning.”

            “I will give you no lodging,” said the old woman.

            “Before I go further, there is a boat there below, and it will be better for you to take it into your hands.”

            “Come in,” said the old woman, “and I will give you lodging for the night.”

            The old woman was always praying by night and day. Margaret asked her, “Why are you always saying your prayers?”

            “I and my mother were living a long while ago in the place they call the White Doon, and a giant came and killed my mother, and I had to come away for fear he would kill myself; and I am praying every night and every day that some one may come and kill the giant.”


The old woman owns a ring, which will only fit the finger of the one destined to kill the giant. Simon’s wife and his brother Stephen arrive together to kill the giant, but the ring will not fit Stephen’s finger, and the giant slays them both. At last, Simon himself arrives at the old woman’s house.


            The next morning there came a gentleman and a beautiful woman to the house, and he gave the old woman the full  of a quart of money to say paternosters for them till morning. The old woman opened a chest and took out a handsome ring and tried to place it on his finger, but it would not go on. “Perhaps it would fit you,” said she to the lady. But her finger was too big.

            When they went out, Margaret asked the old woman who were the man and woman.

            “That is the son of a king of the Eastern World, and the name that is on him is Stephen, and he and the woman are going to the White Doon to fight the giant, and I am afraid they will never come back; for the ring did not fit either of them; and it was told to the people that no one would kill the giant but he whom the ring would fit.”

            The two of them remained during the night praying for him, for fear the giant would kill him; and early in the morning they went out to see what had happened to Stephen and the lady that was with him, and they found them dead near the White Doon.

            “I knew,” said the old woman, “this is what would happen to them. It is better for us to take them with us and bury them in the churchyard.”

            About a month after, a man came into the house, and no sooner was he inside the door than Margaret recognised him.

            “How have you been ever since, Simon?”

            “I am very well,” said he; “it can’t be that you are Margaret?”

            “It is I,” said she.

            “I thought that billow that rose after you, when you got in the boat, drowned you.”

            “It only left me on dry land,” said Margaret.

           “I went to the Eastern World, and my father said to me that he sent my brother to go and fight with the giant, who was doing great damage to the people near the White Doon, and that my wife went to carry his sword.”

            “If that was your brother and your wife,” said Margaret, “the giant killed them.”

            “I will go on the spot and kill the giant, if I am able.”

            “Wait while I try the ring on your finger,” said the old woman.

            “It is too small to go on my finger,” said he.

            “It will go on mine,” said Margaret.

            “It will fit you,” said the old woman.

            Simon gave the full of a quart of money to the old woman, that she might pray for him till he came back. When he was about to go, Margaret said, “Will you let me go with you?”

            “I will not,” said Simon, “for I don’t know that the giant won’t kill myself, and I think it too much that one of us should be in his danger.”

            “I don’t care,” said Margaret.  “In the place where you die, there am I content to die.”

            “Come with me,” said he.

            When they were on their way to the White Doon, a man came before them.

“Do you see that house near the castle?” said the man.

“I see,” said Simon.

“You must go into it and keep a candle lighted till morning in it.”

“Where is the giant?” said Simon.

“He will come to fight you there,” said the man.
They went and kindled a light, and they were not long there when Margaret said to Simon, “Come, and let us see the giants.” [There are baby giants as well as the old one.]

            “I cannot,” said the king’s son, “for the light will go out if I leave the house.”

            “It will not go out,” said Margaret; “I will keep it lighted till we come back.”

            And they went together and got into the castle, to the giant’s house, and they saw no one there but an old woman cooking; and it was not long till she opened an iron chest and took out the young giants and gave them boiled blood to eat.

            “Come,” said Margaret, “and let us go to the house we left.”

            They were not long in it when the king’s son was falling asleep.  Margaret said to him, “If you fall asleep, it will not be long till the giants come and kill us.”

            “I cannot help it,” he said.  “I am falling asleep in spite of me.”

            He fell asleep, and it was not long till Margaret heard a noise approaching, and the giant cried from outside for the king’s son to come out to him.

            “Fum, far, faysogue!  I feel the smell of a lying churl of an Irishman.  You are too great for one bite and too little for two, and I don’t know whether it is better for me to send you into the Eastern World with a breath or put you under my feet in a puddle.  Which would you rather have – striking with knives in your ribs or fighting on the grey stones?”

            “Great, dirty giant,” said Margaret, “not with right or rule did I come in, but by rule and by right to cut your head off in spite of you, when my fine silken feet go up, and your big, dirty feet go down.”

            They wrestled till they brought the wells of fresh water up through the gray stones with fighting and breaking of bones, till the night was all but gone. Margaret squeezed him, and first squeeze she put him down to his knees, the second squeeze to his waist, and the third squeeze to his armpits.  

            “You are the best woman I have ever met. I will give you my court and my sword of light and the half of my estate for my life, and spare to slay me.”

            “Where shall I try your sword of light?”

            “Try it on the ugliest block in the wood.”

            “I see no block at all that is uglier than your own great block.”

  She struck him at the joining of the head and the neck, and cut the head off him.

In the morning when she wakened the king’s son, “Was not that a good proof I gave of myself last night?” said he to Margaret. “That is the head outside, and we shall try to bring it home.”

He went out, and was not able to stir it from the ground.  He went in and told Margaret he could not take it with him, that there was a pound’s weight in the head.  She went out and took the head with her.

            “Come with me,” he said.

            “Where are you going?”

            “I will go the Eastern World, and come with me till you see the place.”

            When they got home, Simon took Margaret with him to his father the king.

            “What has happened to your brother and your wife?” said the king.

            “They have both been killed by giants.  And it is Margaret, this woman here who has killed them.”  

The king gave Margaret a hundred thousand welcomes, and she and Simon were married - and how they are since then, I do not know!



Find more about fairy tales and folklore in my essays "Seven Miles of Steel Thistles" available from Amazon here and here.


Picture credits:
'Leviathan' by Arthur Rackham
Illustration by Arthur Rackham to 'The Manuscript Found in a Bottle' by Edgar Allen Poe

Strong Fairy Tale Heroines: a series!

In 2013 Disney released the story of two princesses: Elsa, with power over ice and snow, and her young sister Anna. When Elsa’s magic accidentally strikes frost into her sister’s heart, the film plays on our expectation that a prince’s kiss will save Anna. Instead, in a feminist twist, the spell is broken by sisterly love and courage while romance is sidelined. It seemed utterly fresh and exciting. 'Inspired by' rather than 'based upon' Hans Andersen's 'The Snow Queen', 'Frozen' wowed children and parents worldwide and became the highest-grossing animated film of all time.

Why was 'Frozen' so successful? It satisfied the hunger of a modern audience keen to identify with strong heroines. Why did the focus on Anna and Elsa seem so unusual? Because there is a persistent misconception that fairy tale heroines are passive. People who may not have read a fairy tale in years recall Snow-White in her glass coffin or Cinderella weeping in the ashes, and assume they stand for all. A discussion on BBC Radio 4’s The Misogyny Book Club (back in December 6 2015) dismissed the entire genre as projecting images of insipid princesses whose role is to lie asleep in towers waiting for princes to rescue them with ‘true love’s kiss’. Fairy-tale fans on Twitter and Facebook erupted, posting examples of tales featuring strong heroines: even so, a relatively small handful of titles kept recurring. There are many, many more.

It would be astonishing if the thousands of traditional tales told across Europe didn’t include characters who could appeal to and satisfy the desire of women as well as men for action and adventure. And of course, they do. In the Grimms’ fairy tales alone, there are more than twice as many heroines who save princes, as there are heroes who save princesses. In fact, taking the collected Grimms’ tales as an example, and discounting the hundred or so which are animal tales, nonsense tales, religious fables and so on, about half of the remaining stories contain main or prominent female characters who rescue brothers or sweethearts, save themselves and others and win wealth and happiness.

This is less surprising when you remember that whether male or female, fairy-tale protagonists are generally underdogs – orphans, simpletons, the youngest child or step-child, whose success is achieved by other means than strength. The major cause of any protagonist’s success is some sort of magical assistance gained by kindness, innocence, quick wits or luck. Not only does this put the sexes on an equal footing, but several heroines have the added advantage of being magic-workers themselves, a skill few heroes possess.



How has this gone unnoticed? Because a long-standing process of social and editorial bias has favoured and raised to prominence the handful of fairy tales we recognise as ‘classic’. When we think of Cinderella’s glass slipper, fairy godmother, pumpkin coach and passive, gentle heroine, we’re thinking of Charles Perrault’s literary version of the story, written to amuse a seventeenth century salon. The Grimms’ version contains none of these elements. Their Cinderella – Aschenputtel – is a girl with her own mind and her own agenda. Her power comes from a magical tree she plants on her mother’s grave: she runs, jumps, climbs and gets her own back on those who have mistreated her. Yet Perrault’s version is the best known, the one found in most picture books for children, the one adapted by Walt Disney for the cartoon and the more recent film.

Seventeenth century writers like Giambattiste Basile, Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy and others transformed nursery and folk tales into a sophisticated literary art form for the amusement of genteel audiences. Yet Perrault’s conscious, arch rendering of ‘Cinderella’ is certainly not less authentic than the version the Grimm brothers patched together more than a century later ‘from three stories current in Hesse’ which all had different beginnings and endings. In fact, both versions are literary: the search for authenticity is vain. Driven by Romantic taste and nationalist motives, the Grimms touched up or wholly rewrote many of the fairy tales they collected, looking to achieve an apparently artless, pure style which would represent the true voice of ‘the folk’. To them we owe the ‘fairy tale’ we recognise today: a construct, but an extraordinarily powerful one.

Inspired by the Grimms, nineteenth century collectors from Russia to Ireland, from Norway to Romania turned to their own peasantry to record and improve traditional tales in the mould of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. In the process they not only uncovered but contributed to what Joseph Campbell has called the ‘homogeneity of style and character’ of the European fairy tale. And from the nineteenth century on, social and moral gatekeepers have preferred the docile charm of Perrault’s heroine to the energy and wild magic of the Grimms’. Most of the famous fairy tales are those whose heroines display the qualities Victorian gentlemen most wished to see in women: gentleness, beauty and passivity. Sir George Dasent who translated the Norwegian tales collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe recognised the strength of Tatterhood or the Mastermaid, but he preferred heroines of ‘the true womanly type’. Surprise, surprise.



And so to illustrate the vitality and strength of the neglected heroines within the classic European fairy tale tradition, from next week I’m beginning a series of new posts. In each, I will introduce a fairy tale with a strong heroine, which can then be read in full. Most of the stories I’ve chosen have been been in print for well over a hundred years, available to everyone, yet most are unknown to the general public. Tatterhood, Lady Mary and the Mastermaid are not household names like the Sleeping Beauty and Snow-White. And ‘The Woman who Went to Hell’ and Margaret, from ‘Simon and Margaret’ are likely to be new even to the most die-hard of fairy tale enthusiasts. At least I think so! I hope there’ll be surprises for everyone.

Of course it’s been done before, notably by Angela Carter. Her seminal collections of folk and fairy tales for Virago in 1990 and 1992 (republished as ‘Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales’, 2005) present a wonderfully diverse selection, a kaleidoscope of different story forms from a worldwide range of cultures and featuring women in all kinds of roles, ‘clever, or brave, or good, or silly, or cruel, or sinister’. She sets a characteristically bold, adult tone for the anthology, opening with a brief Inuit tale about the powerful woman, Sermerssuaq, whose clitoris is so big ‘the skin of a fox would not wholly cover it’. Though striking, this seems to be a tall tale rather than a fairy tale, and one of several which are not easy to interpret. Is Sermerssuaq human, shaman, some kind of goddess? Does she figure in other Inuit stories? Carter’s collection is dazzling, but includes a number of tales which, divorced from their cultural context, we are in danger of reading as exotic oddities.

Fables, cautionary tales, tall tales and jokes are forms intended to deliver a single, memorable point: a warning, a lesson or a laugh. They sometimes fail today because we reject the message (a hen-pecked man asserting himself by beating a bossy wife, for example), and they offer nothing more. By contrast, I take the classic fairy tale to be an adventure story: a sequence of marvellous events occurring to a single main character, or perhaps to a pair of lovers or siblings; and it’s the adventure, not the conclusion, which is important. Though the good usually achieve happiness while the wicked are punished, fairy tales have no didactic intention and no single message. Rather, like poetry, they generate an emotional and interpretative response.

For the purposes of this series I’ll be using the word ‘heroine’ to mean more than ‘main character’: it will indicate someone whose actions and qualities deserve admiration or respect. This might rule out characters like Rapunzel. She’s certainly the protagonist, but the best we can feel for her is pity. Or is it? Look more closely even at that story, and we remember that the prince fails spectacularly to rescue her, and she restores his sight: some of the most passive heroines have more about them than you might suppose. But there is no need for special pleading when so many fairy tales across Europe celebrate active, courageous young women who seize control of their own destinies. How about the heroine of a Romanian tale who sets off in armour on her war-horse to save her father’s honour? Hailed as a hero, she fights dragons and genies, and ultimately rescues and marries another princess, Iliane Goldenhair. The heroine of an Irish fairy tale ‘Simon and Margaret’ fights and kills a giant while her lover sleeps. The flamboyant heroine of the Norwegian ‘Tatterhood’ drives off trolls and witches as she gallops about on a goat. And when brothers and sisters adventure together, it is nearly always the sisters who do the rescuing, not the other way around.



Even the heroes of fairy tales rarely make their way by force. A good heart is more use than a sword. Kindness to animals or old women is rewarded by valuable advice or magical assistance: and where heroes rely on others, heroines often possess their own magical powers. The young peasant girl Bellah of the Breton story ‘The Groac’h of the Isle of Lok’ uses her magic skills to rescue her sweetheart from an enchantress. The giant’s daughter of the ‘The Battle of the Birds’ and the eponymous Mastermaid save their hapless lovers by conjuring up whole catalogues of magical ruses and illusions.

Female intelligence is valued, too. The fiery Scottish heroine Maol a Chliobain uses both magic and sharp wits to trick a giant, while the peasant girl in ‘The Peasant’s Wise Daughter’ is clever enough to save her father and marry a king – whom she later kidnaps in order to teach him a much-deserved lesson. Finally, quietly determined heroines also deserve admiration: the ones who trek stubbornly over glass mountains and wear out iron shoes, the ones who win through by their resolute endurance. Renelde in the Flemish tale ‘The Nettle Spinner’ rejects the advances of her rich overlord and brings about his death by patiently weaving him a nettle shroud. ‘The Woman Who Went to Hell’ endures seven years in Hell and outwits the Devil to bring her lover, an Irish peasant boy, back from the dead. And Maid Maleen survives seven years’ imprisonment in a dark tower, chipping her way out through the wall. All these heroines are brave and not one of them needs rescuing by a man: but fortitude is also courage, historically perhaps particularly the courage of women, and it’s underestimated.



Finally, fairy tales are not romances. In spite of the Disney song ‘One day my prince will come’, ‘Snow-White’ is not a love story. It’s a tale of a cruel queen, a lost child, a dark forest, a magic mirror. The arrival of the prince at the end is no more than a neat way to wrap the story up. Not every fairy tale ends in a marriage, and when they do, something more hard-headed is usually going on. Few fairy tale heroines are princesses by birth. Most are the daughters of merchants, millers, woodcutters or even giants; they are orphans, peasants and servant-girls – the same kind of people who told the tales in the first place, and who prized financial security. Marriage-with-the-prince (or princess) combines wealth and high status in an easily-grasped symbol, and indicates that a person’s endeavours have lifted them to the top of the social heap. I’ve said this elsewhere, but it’s significant that the disapproval directed at heroines who marry princes never seems to be aimed at the many heroes who marry princesses. All those tailors, pensioned-off soldiers, youngest sons and simpletons – no one seems to have any trouble recognising, in their tales, a royal marriage as a metaphor for well-deserved worldly success.

Fairy tales continue to pervade popular culture. Besides Frozen, in the last few years Walt Disney Studios has released Tangled (2010), Maleficent (2014), Into the Woods and Cinderella (2015), Maleficent 2 (2019), a live-action film of Beauty and the Beast ( 2017), and Frozen II (2019). Universal has released Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and its sequel The Huntsman (2016). More are bound to follow, but it’s a pity that most of these films are based upon the same few well-worn tales – about a girl locked in a tower, a girl who sleeps for a hundred years, a girl who has to marry a Beast, and a girl in a glass coffin. Perhaps I’m not being entirely fair here, but that’s the gist. In the effort to turn these modest heroines into something feisty enough to appeal to 21st century audiences, scriptwriters have gone so far as to transform the wicked fairy of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ into the central, sympathetic character. It was ingenious and successful… but there is plenty more choice out there.





Picture credits:

Mollie Whuppie, by Errol le Cain
Cinderella, silhouette, by Arthur Rackham 
Tatterhood, Princess of Wands, from The Fairy Tarot by Lisa Hunt
Bellah finds the Korandon, by HJ Ford
Maid Maleen by Arthur Rackham
Snow White by Benjamin Lacombe

Our Craft or Sullen Art

  IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART


In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.


Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

                                          Dylan Thomas



When I was a girl I used to memorise poems. I could get drunk on words, mutter them under my breath while waiting for buses, chant them aloud in woods or on windy hills where no one would hear me, murmur them at night, poem after poem, to send myself sliding away on a raft of poetry down a river of dreams. Actually I still do.
Dylan Thomas’s poems are incantations that fill the mouth and roll off the tongue like thunder:
Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies…
Whatever does it mean? I have no idea, but it sounds good. Better than good! Grand – restorative – like the crashing chords of a cathedral organ; like wonderful spells. I remember suddenly reciting ‘And death shall have no dominion’ to my ten year-old nephew:
Dead men naked they shall be oneWith the man in the wind and the west moon,Though the bones be picked clean and the clean bones goneThey shall have stars at elbow and foot: Though they go mad, they shall be sane;Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;Though lovers be lost, love shall not:And death shall have no dominion.
His eyes opened wide and he said, ‘Wow!’
Back in the 1970's, there was quite a fashion for obscure poetry; almost every glam-rock album could do the mysteriously evocative stuff. Look at the lyrics of early Genesis under the aegis of Peter Gabriel:
Coming closer with our eyes, a distance falls around our bodies,Out in the garden, the moon shines very bright,Six saintly shrouded men walk across the lawn slowlyThe seventh walks in front, with a cross held high in hand…

In either case – Thomas’s poems or Gabriel’s lyrics – I wasn't bothered about the literal meaning: often there wasn’t one, but the  imagery evoked magical inward visions, emotions and feelings. Not that every song by Genesis or poem by Thomas was quite so obscure, but even in those poems I could make some sense of, like the luminous ‘Fern Hill’ or ‘Poem in October’ –  it was the music which enchanted me.
Nowadays, though I still love the music, I look for meaning too. And behold, it's there, and now I understand it a little bit better.

‘My craft, or sullen art.’ How honest that adjective is, ‘sullen’: because writing can be so hard, so difficult, so damned uncooperative! You try and you try, and it’s not good enough, still not good enough, but you keep trying. You keep trying because what you’re really aiming for, what you want the most – and he’s right, he’s so right – isn’t money, isn’t ‘ambition or bread’, nor fame: ‘the strut and trade of charms/On the ivory stages’. No!

We don't write for the critics. We don't write (we wouldn’t dare, though maybe Thomas dared) with an eye on posterity and the hope of joining the ranks of ‘the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms’. We don’t write for fame and most of us don’t get it – or even make a living out of it. We're grateful to those who find and read our words, for no one owes us any attention and most will pay no heed. I think we write because this sullen, difficult art won't let us go. We write to honour ‘the lovers, their arms round the griefs of the ages’, because each person in this world is such a lover. We write to share, as best as we are able, the common wages of the secret heart.




'The Lovers' by John Everell Millais, British Museum

Glass Slippers, Fur Slippers! Cinderella's Shoes.

There are extraordinary numbers of superstitions about shoes - though most are now unfamiliar to us 21st century mortals.  According to Iona Opie and Moira Tatem’s ‘Dictionary of Superstitions’, an old shoe hung up at the fireside was thought to bring luck. You would turn your shoes upside down to prevent nightmares, or to stop a dog from howling; it was unlucky to put your right shoe on before your left; burning a pair of old shoes could prevent children from being stolen by the fairies; bad luck was bound to follow if a pair of new shoes was placed upon a table -- and so on and on. In fact, shoes have often been often hidden within the fabric of buildings, possibly as apotropaic charms to ward off evil.



Here's a photo of a whole collection of such shoes from East Anglia, courtesy of St Edmundsbury Heritage Service. Northampton Museum keeps a ‘Concealed Shoe Index’; in a pamplet written for the museum J.M. Swann describes some of the finds, dating from the early 15thcentury into the 20th:  
The shoes are usually found not in the foundations but in the walls, over door lintels, in rubble floors, behind wainscoting, under staircases…  shoes occur singly or with others, very rarely in pairs, occasionally in ‘families’ – a man’s, woman’s, and a range of sizes of children’s. Sometimes they are found with other objects – a candlestick, wooden bowl or pot, wine glass, spoon, knife, sheath, purse, glove, pipe… The condition of the shoes, like the objects found with them, is usually very poor: worn out, patched, repaired.



My mother preserved some tiny silver shoes which were used to decorate her wedding cake. Old shoes used to be thrown after the departing bride and groom for luck and I can remember at least once seeing old boots tied to the bumper of the honeymoon couple's car. Maybe this still happens?  It's a practice which goes back centuries. Opie and Tatem quote John Heywood in 1546: ‘For good lucke, cast an olde shoe after mee’ and Ben Jonson in 1621: ‘Hurle after an olde shooe, I’le be merry what e’er I doe.’  Francis Kilvert writes in his diary for January 1, 1873:

The bride went straightway to her carriage. Someone thrust an old white pair of satin shoes into my hand with which I made an ineffectual shot at the post-boy, and someone else behind me missed the carriage altogether and gave me with an old shoe a terrific blow on the back of the head…
Shoes are very personal items. They literally mould themselves to the shape of an individual’s foot. Anyone who’s sorted through the clothes of someone who’s died will know how the sight of a pair of their empty shoes is especially poignant. It’s as if well-worn shoes have almost become part of the person. Perhaps that’s why, as the folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould writes in his 1913 ‘Book of Folk-Lore’:…when we say that a man has stepped into his father’s shoes, we mean that the authority, position and consequence of the parent has been transferred to his son.

Now to Cinderella. Numerous variants of the Cinderella story (tale type ATU 510A) include the motif of the heroine’s shoe which is dropped or lost and, when restored and matched to her foot, proves her identity and worth.  In Basile’s ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ or ‘The Hearth-Cat’ (1634) the heroine Zezolla drops a fashionable ‘stilted shoe’ or ‘chopine’ as she escapes from the festa: when she appears at a banquet which the King has ordered for all the ladies in the land, it darts to her foot like iron to a magnet.  Chopines were the platform shoe to end all platform shoes – more like towers than platforms, as you can see below – and must have been extremely difficult to walk in: no wonder Zezolla lost one.  (They're almost incredible, but apparently some were as tall as twenty inches high and you can find out more about them here.)

16th century style Venetian chopinePerrault’s Cinderella has slippers made of glass, such an improbable material for shoes that some have argued it must be a mistake, a confusion between ‘vair’ (parti-coloured fur) and ‘verre’ (glass).  But really, when has improbability ever troubled a fairy tale?  Aschenputtel’s shoes are golden, Scottish Rashin Coatie’s slippers are made of satin, and in one of my favourite versions, the Irish tale ‘Fair, Brown and Trembling’, the heroine Trembling gets the jazziest shoes of all. She asks a henwife (a magical figure in Irish tales) for clothes fit to go to church in. On the first day the henwife obliges with a dress as white as snow and green shoes, on the second she provides a dress of black satin and red shoes, and on the third day Trembling demands:

“A dress red as a rose from the waist down, and white as snow from the waist up; a cape of green on my shoulders, and a hat on my head with a red, a white and a green feather in it, and shoes for my feet with the toes red, the middle white and the backs and heels green.”

Flamboyant in these fairy colours, riding on a white mare with ‘blue and gold-coloured diamond-shaped spots’ all over its body, Trembling cannot enter the church and has to listen to mass from outside the door, but the king’s son sees her and falls in love.  Racing beside Trembling’s horse as she rides away, he pulls a shoe from her foot and searches all Ireland for the fair lady.  

In a story from China dating to 850/860 AD, the heroine Yeh Xien loses and has restored to her a gold shoe ‘as light as down’, and in what may be the oldest recorded variant of the tale – from the early first century AD – there is still a shoe, or at least a sandal.  It comes in part of an account of the Pyramids by the Roman historian, geographer and traveller Strabo. After describing the Pyramids, he explains that one of them: 
… is said to be the tomb of a courtesan, built by her lovers, and whose name, according to Sappho the poetess, was Doriche. She was the mistress of her brother Charaxus, who traded to the port of Naucratis with wine of Lesbos. Others call her Rhodopis.
Needless to say, this isn't true... It may be argued that this story doesn’t fit the Cinderella tale type because Rhodopis isn't downtrodden and neglected, but while downtrodden and neglected heroes and heroines are two a penny, the shoe motif seems to me the distinguishing feature of the Cinderella story. And on this evidence, the tale has been around for at least 2000 years. In some versions – as in Basile’s – the shoe literally leaps to the true owner's foot: ‘[Rashin Coatie] ran away to the grey stone, where the red calf dressed her in her bravest dress, and she went to the prince, and the slipper jumped out of his pocket on to her foot, fitting her without any chipping or paring. So the prince married her that very day…’

As well he might, since the fitting of the shoe may actually have been part of the ceremony.  The folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould wrote in 1913:

In some French provinces, when the bride is about to go to church, all her old shoes have been hidden away. In Roussillon it is always the nearest relative to the bridegroom who puts on her shoes, and these are new. The meaning comes out clearer in Berry, where all the assistants try to put the bride’s shoes on, but fail, and it is only the bridegroom who succeeds. It was also a custom in Germany for the old shoes to be left behind and the new shoes given by the bridegroom to be assumed.

What did it mean?  Perhaps many things. If it was traditional for the bridegroom to place new shoes on the bride’s feet, it’s possible he was asserting authority over her, especially since Baring-Gould goes on to add that ‘A harsher way … was for him to tread hard on the bride’s foot, to show that he would be master.’  (These are moments when one feels that folk-customs aren’t so charming after all. Hmmm.) Baring-Gould says, ‘When in the Psalm [60] the expression occurs, ‘Over Edom have I cast out My shoe’, the meaning is that Jehovah extended His authority over Edom.’ So a shoe could be a symbol of dominance, of trampling on someone. But in ‘The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren’ Iona and Peter Opie write, ‘When anyone receives a pair of new shoes the custom is to stand on her toes for luck.’  As with most of human nature and culture, it’s all in the interpretation.

The young man kneeling in front of his bride, touching her ankles as he slides new shoes on to her feet – you don’t have to be a died-in-the-wool Freudian to see something sexy about that, and I bet quite a few young couples enjoyed the frisson of – finally! – permitted, public, personal contact.  But I think there’s more to it.  A very long and complicated Irish tale ‘The King Who Had Twelve Sons’ contains the Cinderella ‘lost shoe’ motif, but the roles are reversed: it’s the princess who tugs the hero’s boot off as he rides past.  Taking on what we tend to think of as the male role in this story type, she proclaims ‘a gathering of all the men in the three islands that she might see who the man was whom the shoe fitted’.  In this case too, as soon as the hero arrives, ‘The shoe was in her hand, and it leaped from her hand till it went on his foot. "You are the man that was on the pony the day that he killed the piast," the princess proclaims, "and you are the man whom I will marry."’ 

Given the very personal nature of shoes – people rarely lend them – and the number of superstitions about them, it seems to me that the shoe in the Cinderella stories is more than something to walk about in. First of all, it’s a status symbol: in all of the stories the shoe is of high quality and made of rare materials. This, in a time when many people had no shoes at all. But it seems to me that it belongs to the heroine in almost the same way as her hair or fingernails do: it fits no other foot, no other person can wear it. The Cinder-girl is identified and revealed through the medium of the glass or fur or brocade slipper because her shoes are a magical representation of her true self. 
What chopines said about Zezolla though -- I don't know!







Picture credits:

Cinderella: Watercolour by Edward Burne-Jones, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Wikimedia Commons 

Concealed shoes, St Edmondsbury: Wikimedia Commons

Miniature silver shoes, author's possession.

Reconstruction of a (moderately high) Venetian chopine in the Shoe Museum, Lausanne: Wikimedia Commons

Rashin-Coatie and the Red Calf, by John D. Batten

Cinderella, by Warwick Goble

OUT IN THE NIGHT WIND: a winter ghost story

This is a short ‘gaslamp fantasy' set in Victorian London, in Wapping, circa 1870. With the single exception of  ‘Mr Eden’s’ house, all the streets, pubs, factories and other buildings named in it really existed and may be found on maps of the period. None of the characters is real. Those who know and love the fairy tale novels of George Macdonald will quickly recognise my debt to his wonderful children’s book ‘At The Back of the North Wind’: but the content of this story is emphatically not suitable for children. Nor is it a Christmas story. It is a fairy tale for adults – or perhaps a winter ghost story.

OUT IN THE NIGHT WIND


Someone is sobbing and shrieking in the yard outside. Little Doll Hardy wakes and rolls over. She needs to pee. The mattress is damp, soured with overlapping stains from all the other times she’s wet it. If she does it again she’ll be a dirty girl. Pa will hit her and Annie will be angry... but she’s alone, and the wind rattles the casement, and she’s afraid of the ugly black grate in the corner of the room. It’s cold as sin, and breathes out an undying draught like an iron mouth sighing. She mustn’t pee. She thrusts her clenched fist between her legs – lies struggling till it’s nearly too late – springs out with a whimper, drags the cracked old pot from under the bed and sits on the sharp china rim, bare feet curling against the floorboards, eyes screwed shut, tense and quivering. Soft and close, something rustles. She unsticks her eyes in terror. Nothing – but the fireplace moans, a long, hollow sound. She leaps back to bed and burrows under the thin blanket. ‘Go away!’ There's a gentle, icy breath on the nape of her neck.‘Go ‘way! Stop it!’ Doll squeals in tears of fright.‘Only teasing. You’re like a kitten, ain’t you? Nothin’ but bones and eyes.’With an abrupt movement Doll sits up. A girl is flitting about the room in the half-dark, bending to touch and examine everything in it, humming a faint, droning tune.‘Who are you? How d’you get in?’‘’S easy for me to get into places like this,’ says the girl. She has the longest black hair Doll’s ever seen: it merges into the darkness as it lifts and drifts and spins across the room, and cold air streams from it. ‘Tonight I come down by the chimbley, and I’m goin’ out by that broken pane in the winder, but I could just as easily have got in another way.’‘You couldn’t get frew the winderpane! You’re too big.’‘I’m leaving that way all the time we speak,’ returns the girl.  ‘No you ain’t, you’re right here.’‘But you can’t see all of me.’‘Can’t I?’ Doll opens her eyes wide.‘How could yer? I can’t see all of you either. I can’t see what you’re thinking, can I? ‘Sides, I can be as little as I like, and as big too. Bigger than this room, as big as the sky. I can be indoors and out at the same time.  As for never seeing me before, you know me right enough. I’m Night Wind. I’ll be blowing up a storm tonight.  Come play with me. We can run over the rooftops together.’ She offers a transparent hand. ‘Sounds bully fun, but it’s too cold,’ says Doll.‘You won’t notice that for long,’ says the girl. ‘You ask the others.’‘What others?’‘The other kids that play with me.’‘Dunno…’ begins Doll, half-tempted, but the street door bangs below and feet clatter on the stairs.  ‘Annie’s back!’ Doll bounces, triumphant, as her sister bursts in. ‘I peed in the jordan, Annie! I ain’t afraid o’ the grate no more! And guess what? Here’s Night Wind come down the chimbley!’‘I can tell.’ Annie shivers. ‘It’s as cold in here as it is out. Used the pot, did yer? Good girl!’ A
match flares: she lights a candle stuck to a cracked saucer. As the flame bends and smokes, Doll looks around. ‘Where’s she gone?’‘Who?’‘Night Wind. She come down the chimbley like a little girl and went a-dancin’ around the room. She asked me to play with her.’‘You’ve bin dreamin.’ Annie pulls off her shawl and drags a broken old brush over her head, bashing her hair as if punishing it.‘Your ‘air’s lovely and long, Annie,’ Doll says admiringly, ‘but it ain’t anyfink like so long as Night Wind’s.’‘Stop goin’ on about the night wind.’‘Where’s Pa?’ ‘Drinking.’ With a vicious pinch Annie puts out the candle and flings herself on the bed in a jangle of springs. ‘Three shillin’ he got at the docks today, unloadin’ tobaccer from a Yankee clipper, an’ he’s drinking the lot in The Three Suns. Shove over, I’m not takin’ me clo’es off. I gotter get warm.’ She spreads her shawl on top of the blanket and dives in. ‘Come on, cuddle up.’‘You’re freezin’,’ Doll complains as her sister’s cold clothes touch her. But she wriggles in close. Warmth creeps between them. Footsteps come and go in the crowded tenement. A baby cries in the room above. Arguing voices mingle and part. Doll dozes…She’s woken by a crash on the stairs and a voice singing. ‘They calls me Hangin’ Johnny! Haul away, me boys!’            Doll sits up with a rush. Annie hauls her out of bed. ‘Up you get. Quick. Out of ‘is way.’            ‘And first I hanged me granny – haul away, me boys –’            The door leaps in its frame under a drunken pounding.              ‘I hanged her up so canny – so hang, boys, hang!’            Annie darts to lift the latch. A man lurches in, filling the room with the resinous aura of gin. He crashes across the bed like a falling tree.  ‘What’ll us do?’ whimpers Doll.              Annie tiptoes forward. ‘Pa. Move over.’ She pushes him. ‘You’re takin’ up the whole bed, Pa. Make room!’                          The man winds an arm around Annie’s neck, pulling her down on top of him. His other arm comes around her waist. ‘Annie!’ he mumbles. ‘Me sweet darlin’ Annie, c’me ‘ere, be a good girl to yer old dad...’  ‘Let go, Pa. Lemme go!’ There’s a brief struggle and she wriggles from his arms. He pushes himself up. ‘Wha’s wrong with you anyway? I on’y wanted a kiss, a li’l, a li’l kiss.’ ‘Liar! Drunken pig! Drinkin’ all the rent!’‘Earn the bloody rent yerself! Get out, go on, get out!’  ‘You ain’t frowing us out, it’s freezin’ cold!’‘An’ there’s better gals than you out in it,’ he bellows, ‘working for a livin’.  Go and earn yer keep!’‘I hates you, you bastard!’ Annie shrieks. She runs out, and Doll runs after her on to the steep, unlit stairs.  The door claps shut behind them.  ‘I  hates him, I does!’ Annie sits halfway down the stairs and cries into her skirt. Doll presses up to her, and Annie puts an arm around her, wiping her eyes. ‘We ain’t going nowhere, are we Doll?’ she says fiercely. ‘We’ll just sleep right ‘ere on the stairs.’  They huddle on the bare treads, and the draught runs up and down past them like a poor little skivvy. Doll strains her eyes and can almost see her flitting shape, dark on dark. Is it Night Wind?‘Yes,’ a cold voice whispers faintly, ‘but I can’t play with you in here, there’s too much sweeping to do.’ The door of the foot of the stairs scrapes open.  Out comes the chimneysweep who rents the downstairs room. A strong foxy smell wafts up. He places his candle on the stairs where the slipshod flame streams in the draught,  opens the front door, pulls up his nightshirt and stands pissing into the yard, while Annie and Doll grip each other, smothering giggles. Finished, he shuts the door and shuffles back to collect the candle. Looks up and sees them.‘’Ello me dears.’ His face is unwashed, streaked with soot. ‘Dad kicked you out?’ He winks at them with one white eyelid. ‘You can come in wiv me, I’ll be good to yer.’  His striped calico nightshirt hangs down fore and aft to reveal bare hairy legs, knobbly knees and incredibly black and dirty feet. Annie draws a sharp breath. ‘No, fanks.’            ‘Sure? You can ‘ave a bed for the night instead of them cruel hard stairs. Or a couple o’ bags o’ soot, soft as a featherbed if not so clean. The kiddie can sleep on them, an’ you an’ me can cuddle up.’‘Don’t you come a step nearer,’ Annie shrills, ‘or I’ll call my Pa.’             He laughs. ‘Come ‘ere, you fresh little judy and don’t try pitching it to me that you’ll call yer dad, ’e’s drunk, an if ’e wasn’t, ’e still wouldn’t care.’            He reaches for her ankle. Annie gives a screech. She catches Doll’s hand and they jump past him down the stairs, knocking the candlestick over. It rolls over the floor and goes out. She wrenches the street door open, and next minute she and Doll are out in the night. 


Fox and Goose Yard is swept by a freezing blast which whirls around and around as though a madwoman with a broom is trying to scour out all the corners. Foul puddles crunch and crack under their stumbling feet. ‘Come on,’ gasps Annie, but, ‘I ain’t got me boots,’ Doll sobs. ‘I left ‘em behind.’ ‘Oh God!’ cries Annie, and bends down. ‘Jump on me back, I’ll give you a ride.’ And with Doll clutching her neck she hurries out of the yard into Star Street and down to the long curved thoroughfare of Wapping Wall.It’s close to midnight. The four-storey warehouses lining the river echo to the clop of drayhorses and the rumble of iron-rimmed wheels. Late-night voices howl drunken greetings. A heap of rags groans in a doorway. Outside The Three Suns Annie pauses to listen to the wheedling music of a fiddle and voices bellowing a song. They pass dark slotted alleyways that end at the river-stairs, smelling of sewage and mud. They hear a paddle steamer’s thumping heartbeat, and the slap of water against the steps. Clinging to Annie like a monkey, Doll tips her head to look right up at the sky, where smoke whirls and clouds rush. Is Night Wind up there with her gang of children, playing wild games over the warehouse roofs?   Annie staggers and halts. Doll slides down and hugs her hand. ‘Awright, Annie? Where’re we goin’?’ Her teeth chatter.  ‘Dunno,’ Annie sounds miserable. ‘I was finking of the night shelter by the workh’us, but likely it’s full: an’ they makes you work all next day pickin’ bleedin’ oakum. Tell you what. ’Ow’s about the coffee-stall by the swing-bridge? It’ll be warm by the brazier, an’ we might beg a ha’penny for some coffee… hot, sweet coffee.’ She shudders with longing.Doll points. ‘Them ladies might ‘elp us.’Annie looks. At the end of the road a brilliant gas flare burns over the iron gates of the Ratcliff Gasworks. Two girls loiter there in short skirts that show the calves of their white-stockinged legs. A gentleman accosts them. They become alert, but he's wagging a finger and offering leaflets. They back away, shaking their heads, and one of them shouts after him, ‘Give us a tanner, you mean bleeder! Hell-fire on a night like this, you fink we're bovvered? Bring it on, we’re bloody perished!’ Annie straightens with sudden purpose. ‘Theywon’t, but if ’e’s dishing out tracts, he’s a clergyman. I bet he can spare us a copper or two. Less catch ’im up. C’mon, I can’t carry you any furver, you’ll ’ave to run.’Doll scurries after Annie,wincing as the stones bite her feet. The gentleman is striding up New Gravel Lane towards the swing-bridges, where the glow of the sugar refineries lights the sky behind Shadwell Basin. As they hurry past the two girls shivering under the gas lamp there’s a lull in the wind. Doll glances up and sees a giant woman standing by the gasworks gates, bare white arms lifted above her head and black hair shooting right up into the sky.‘Annie, there’s Night Wind!’ she cries. The vast figure bends over the huddled girls, hair dropping through the lamplight in glistening skeins, to kiss their foreheads. ‘Ain’t it fuckin’ cold!’ one of them exclaims, half-crying. ‘It’s sleetin’ now! I’ll die if I ‘ave to stay out ‘ere much longer.’ But she doesn’t move from her windy post.

  
 ‘Come on!’ Annie tugs Doll along. The gentleman is going at a great pace, a hand to his hat, greatcoat flapping. But higher than the warehouse roofs, three towering black masts move slowly across the street ahead of them, barring the way – like a giant beast dragging its way between the buildings. ‘A ship comin’ frew into the Eastern Dock!’ Annie says in triumph. ‘The swing-bridge is up! We’ll catch him!’  They hurry on. Doll coughs on the taffy smells of burning sugar, and smoke from the sugar works. She rubs tear-filled eyes and sees the Night Wind running beside her – not so high as when she stood by the gasworks gates, but still far taller than human. She’s wearing a dress that drifts as she moves, unravelling in cloudy tatters. Her inky hair blows over her face, and she flings it back with a gesture that sends torn newspaper whirling up the street. A scatter of children race at her heels, snatching at her hands and hair: they’re there and not there, like flickering shadows. ‘Is all them kiddies yours?’ Doll gasps, trotting along. ‘You was jist a little girl afore, an’ now you’re a lady.’‘They’re mine now, coz no one else wants ’em. When I find ’em in the street I give ’em a kiss, and they come and play with me. Anyway who are you calling a lady? I work as hard as anyone, I’m off to sweep all the crossings in the city tonight. Where are you off to? I shouldn’t follow that bloke if I was you.’‘Why not?’‘The children say so,’ says Night Wind, and she and all the tumbling children in her train rush up the street and away into the air like smoke.  West, and east, the docks are a clutter of masts. Lights oscillate in the treacle-black water. The coffee stall on the corner sends out a rich, tempting scent... 

 The tall gentleman stands beside it, tapping his cane, waiting for the great ship to pass through and the bridge to be lowered. As Annie sidles up to him, Doll tugs her hand. ‘Annie. Annie... Night Wind says not.’ ‘Shut it! Sir? If you please, sir?’ Annie whines. He swings around, lifting his cane. ‘Won’t you give us sixpence,’ she begs, ‘for a mug o’ hot coffee and a bed outta the night wind? Me little sister here’s ever so cold.’ Doll’s mouth waters at the steamy smell of coffee and she thrusts out a crooked palm.  He doesn’t fumble in his pocket as they’d hoped. He stares at them, his face a paleness they cannot read. His breath smokes as he stares. He stares especially at Annie, whose dark unbound hair tangles in the wind. When he does speak, in a low voice as if talking to himself, Doll can’t make sense of it. ‘What a Babylon this city is, what a smoking Gomorrah! How shall it be cleansed? The harlots who mocked me, I shake their poisonous touch from my sleeve; they hold no temptation for me. But these are children, innocent lambs…’ He bends over them, tall hat outlined against the sky. ‘Have you nowhere to go? No father or mother? How old are you, child?’
‘Firteen, sir,’ Annie says readily, ‘and sis is jist seven. Ma’s dead with the baby, and farver’s
turned us out. ’E don’t care nuffink about us. Please won’t you give us a copper or two?’‘Thirteen,’ he murmurs, ‘and unprotected on the streets at night. Without help, her innocence will not last till morning – if it it is not already lost. Such eyes and hair! Like a Murillo Madonna. And there is the younger child too. The Lord has delivered them unto me, and who am I to say nay? It is my duty, my Christian duty to take them in.’The overhanging black side of the ship has slid past into the Eastern Dock and the lock-keeper and his lad are turning the capstans to lower the bridge. The gentleman picks Doll up in his arms and she leans away from him shrieking, ‘Annie, Annie, don’t let ’im ’ave me!’  ‘Shut it!’ Annie does a tense jig on the cobbles. ‘The gentleman wants to be kind – don’tcher, sir?’Oh, does he, does he… scuffles the tumbling wind around the coffee stall.‘I mean to help you,’ says the gentleman. ‘I have sheltered other children before you. I am the director of a charitable institution. You have nothing to fear.’
He lives north of the Highway in Well Close Square opposite a solid white church with a campanile, whose rocking bell scatters a sowing of notes on the gale as they climb the step to a narrow three-storey house with dark windows. Doll is limp with tiredness, her head rolling on his shoulder as he fumbles for his key and lets them in.  As he lowers her into Annie’s arms and turns to close the door, a shrieking gust of wind forces its way in and lifts the edge of the carpet. For a moment Doll half-glimpses a wild, dark girl on the step, beating at the door with her fists. But the gentleman leans on the door and shoots the bolts. He locks it and pockets the key.  The night wind is shut out. The gaslight in the hall is a dim pearly glow. All is chill, clean and silent. The stairs are a gulf of darkness. Annie grips Doll’s hand so tight it hurts. ‘Are yer – are yer married, sir?’He hangs up his hat, strips the gloves from his long white hands. ‘My wife is dead.’ He removes his coat. ‘I live in Christian simplicity with my sister, who now keeps house for me.’ He raises his voice. ‘Elizabeth!’A door opens at the end of the hall and a hollow-faced woman of about forty comes out with a lamp. ‘You’re late,’ she begins, ‘I’ve kept supper for you. Oh!’  Her eyes widen in consternation – maybe even a flicker of alarm. ‘William – is this wise?’‘My dear Elizabeth,’ he says with sudden almost savage gaiety, ‘here are two more innocents snatched from the Juggernaut of the City of Night. Take them, feed them, wash them and put them to bed. Child, what are your names?’‘Annie, sir,’ falters Annie, clutching her shawl, ‘and me little sister’s Doll.’  ‘Doll?’ he repeats with a moue of distaste. ‘Dorothea, I suppose, a beautiful name: spoiled as so many things are spoiled.’ He takes Annie under the chin. He has very light eyes, mouse-coloured hair and whiskers. ‘Are you a good girl, Annie?’‘S-sometimes, sir.’‘Do you say your prayers?  Do you know who made the world?’‘God,’ says Annie more boldly. ‘Ma told me that. ’ ‘And our Saviour Jesus Christ? Who is He?’‘I don’t rightly know, but Ma did tell as how he once give a penny loaf and a bit o’ fish to a lot of poor people, so I reckon he was a very kind gentleman, almost as kind as yerself, sir.’ She gives him an awkward, flirty smile. But his face is cold. He pinches her chin, thumb just stroking the contours of her cheek. ‘The softness of childhood is yet on this cheek. And how easily it might be rubbed off – like the bloom from a butterfly’s wings. Are you truly a good girl, Annie?’ he adds, low. She bears his gaze for a moment more, then twists her face aside, and Miss Elizabeth interjects, ‘If she is, she won’t know what you mean. But she won’t be, William. Remember last time?’‘We shall see,’ he says over his shoulder. Then, turning back, ‘Well, Annie, angels brought you to me tonight: angels will look after you: they watch by the pillows of innocent children: when such children die, angels carry them to paradise.’  He lets her go. ‘Off with you. I shall see you later.’ He turns the knob of a door on the left of the hall and vanishes into a room glowing with firelight.   Doll rubs her eyes. Annie puts an arm around her shoulders. They look up, and Miss Elizabeth looks down at them both. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she says in a quiet, bleak voice – so much like an old woman in the stories Ma sometimes told, that Doll half expects her to add, ‘The master of this house is an ogre who eats little girls.’ But after staring at them for another moment she only sighs and says, ‘Well, come along and wash. I won’t have your dirt all over my clean sheets.’She pushes them through a dim-lit, warm kitchen and out into a cold scullery.  ‘Strip! Strip! Every rag on your backs will have to be burned.’  Doll peeks up at Annie. Annie’s eyes are enormous. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Miss Elizabeth snaps. ‘I’ll bring you nightgowns.’
‘My brother is a very good man,’ says Miss Elizabeth as, lamp in hand, she proceeds ahead of them up the carpeted stairs.             ‘Ain’t this a bit of all right?’ Annie whispers, squeezing Doll’s hand.  She’s wearing a long-sleeved calico nightgown with a trim of crocheted lace around the high neck, and looks clean and vulnerable, her dark hair wet-combed hard off her face, tight-plaited down her back.  ‘A true evangelist,’ Miss Elizabeth continues, ‘he sits on the board of a Christian orphanage and has many charitable friends. We shall hope to find a place for you within a day or two.’ Reaching the first broad landing, she pauses, lifting the lamp high by its handle and waiting for them to catch up. ‘It’s kind of him, miss,’ says Annie.‘Yes.’ Miss Elizabeth seems ill at ease. ‘It’s not the first time he’s found a little girl on the street and brought her home. I hope you will be more grateful than the last child…’  ‘Course we will, miss,’ Annie says, but Doll asks, ‘Why wasn’t she?’ Miss Elizabeth’s fingers clench around the hooped handle of the lamp. ‘She was a wicked liar!’ Doll and Annie flinch at her vehemence. ‘My brother is a good, good man, incapable – I owe him everything, everything. My home, my life, is his.’Distractedly she sets the lamp down on a small bureau and twists her hands together. ‘What else could I have done?’ she mutters, and they realise she’s not talking to them any more. She squeezes her eyelids into pale creases, as if shutting out some unbearable sight. Then sighs, opens her eyes and seems to notice them again. ‘Well,’ she says in a more ordinary voice. ‘I am sure you will both be grateful and good. Now, this is where Mr Eden and I have our rooms.’Three handsome dark doors open off the landing, adorned with shiny china knobs and fingerplates. All are shut. ‘Shall we sleep with you?’ asks Doll timidly.   Miss Elizabeth frowns. ‘No indeed, you’ll sleep in the garret. If you shouldneed me’ – her expression forbids it – ‘you must knock at this door here. This one: that at the front is my brother’s.’‘So who sleeps there?’ Doll points to the third. ‘No one,’ Miss Elizabeth says sharply. ‘That is his deceased wife’s room, Mrs Eden’s. It is kept just as it was. No one goes in and no one uses it. We keep it locked.’Doll is truly puzzled.  ‘Is she still there?’ ‘Still there?’ Even in the lamplight they see Miss Elizabeth flush dark red.  ‘What a shocking thing to say! Still there?’ Breathless with anger, but low-voiced, she continues, ‘She had a beautiful funeral and is an angel in paradise now. Which is more than you’ll ever be, if you don’t learn better.’ She adds, as if it is something she has often repeated, ‘It is locked because to see the room with all her things in it would cause him too much pain.’‘That’s sad,’ Annie says. ‘They must a’ been real happy.’‘Yes.’ Again Miss Elizabeth sounds unsettled. She looks at the closed door. ‘Although… Ellen was so young, so small. Too slight to be a mother. I warned him, and so it proved…’ Still eyeing the door she murmurs, ‘It is a terrible thing to live with. Grief and guilt. No one has ventured into that room for seven years.’ She turns away with a visible shudder. ‘Now with your foolish chatter, you’ve made me entirely forget the blankets. I left them airing by the fire. You – Annie, if that is your name? – you had better come back down with me and help carry them. You, wait here and pray God to make you a better child.’ Alone on the landing, Doll stares at the door that belongs to the dead lady.  The oil-lamp throws glossy reflections on its dark lacquered surface. A whole room for a dead person who isn’t even there! When Ma died with the baby, they lived with the corpses for three days till Pa got money from the burial-club to pay for a coffin.  The landing is very quiet. In the hall below, a clock breaks its regular ticking to strike a fragile, fairylike ‘one’. Far outside, the wind skirmishes around the house, a distant skirling like a restless voice crying, ‘Where are you? I can’t reach you, I can’t find you.’ Here are no busy draughts running up and down, no broken windowpanes by which Night Wind can enter.  Doll tiptoes to the head of the stairs. Her shadow moves ahead, leaping against the door of the locked room… And there is a draught after all, a whisper, a sibilance flowing dry and cool from under the forbidden door. Doll gets down on hands and knees. ‘Night Wind, is that you?’ she whispers. The draught smells sweet and tainted. She wrinkles her nose. ‘Are you there?’On the other side of the door, the floorboards ease with a slow, subtle creak. Something gropes against the panels. The door thuds softly in its frame. .           ‘Who is it?’ Doll is beginning to be frightened. ‘What d’you want?’Releeeasse me… hisses the draught under the door.The key stands proud in the lock: a thick brass shank with a loop which looks easy to twist. Doll sucks air into her thin chest in a shuddering rush. Her fingers hover over the key. Then with a quick tug she pulls it out and applies one eye to the keyhole. Another eye looks back. ‘Annie!’ Doll is three-quarters of the way downstairs, hanging breathless over the bannister. Annie comes racing up, a pile of blankets in her arms. ‘Whatever are yer shrieking for? You was told to stay put!’ she scolds. Miss Elizabeth follows with a candle exclaiming, ‘What a fearful noise! What have you been up to now, you naughty girl?’ Below her, Mr Eden looks out into the hall.‘There’s somefing in that room,’ Doll sobs. She can still see the dark pupil flash and roll. ‘There ain’t!’ Annie pushes her face close to Doll’s. Her eyes blaze. ‘Shut it!  Just shut it, or you’ll ruin everyfing.’ The expression on her face cows Doll. It’s furious, triumphant, hungry, scared. The face of someone who knows something Doll doesn’t understand. ‘I wanta go home,’ she whispers.‘Well you can’t. Mr Eden, he’s a-goin’ to look after us. If we’re good.’ 
At the top of the twisting attic stairs – the lower half, visible from the main landing, is carpeted with a worn old runner: the upper half is bare – is a small room under the slant of the roof. It holds a high iron bed, which Annie and Doll make up under Miss Elizabeth’s supervision. The night presses on the dormer window. It feels wilder up here in the garret, but somehow safer too. A different country. ‘They are ready now, William,’ says Miss Elizabeth, turning to the door, ‘if you wish to come in.’Mr Eden steps in from the tiny dark landing. His shadow streams up the wall.  ‘Now you must
kneel and say your prayers.’ ‘We dunno how,’ Annie whispers.Miss Elizabeth snaps: ‘You should pray to be a good girl, and you should thank God that my brother rescued you from the streets.’‘I will teach you.  Kneel down,’ says Mr Eden.Annie clutches Doll and pulls her down.‘Close your eyes, both of you, and clasp your hands.’ He waits. It’s eerie, feeling him look at them while their eyes are shut. Doll peeks, letting a smear of light steal under her lids.  ‘Almighty God,’ Mr Eden prays in a sonorous voice, ‘who from the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and made infants to glorify thee by their deaths: mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us, that by innocence of life and constancy of faith we may glorify thy name even unto death. Amen.’‘Amen,’ says Miss Elizabeth.‘You must say these words after me: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’Doll and Annie repeat them, stumbling a little.  ‘That will do for tonight,’ says Mr Eden, and he goes down the attic stair.‘Into bed,’ says Miss Elizabeth, ‘and don’t come down till morning. Let me hear no noise from either of you.’ And she goes too, taking the candle. Her footsteps tap away down the bare wooden treads. The light under the door fades to black.  Annie and Doll lie silently between cold, clean sheets. The feather pillows are soft, the blankets firm and heavy. Beyond the slanted ceiling, the night wind roars over the slates.‘Don’t pee the bed,’ says Annie.‘I won’t.’After a bit, Annie says, ‘It’s worth it. Ain’t it? To be warm, like this.’‘What’s worth it?’‘Being good. Doing,’ Annie hesitates, ‘what he says.’‘I don’t like him.’‘Then you’re an ungrateful toad.’‘M’not!’‘You are.’ Annie struggles up on one elbow. ‘You oughter be grateful to me: I got you here, I was the one what got up the nerve to beg a copper off of Mr Eden. If I ‘adn’t, where would we be now? Frozen stiff in that wind. Listen to it, blowin’ fit to wake the dead. If we’re good an’ do what he says, he’ll look arter us. He’ll find us somewhere to live.’‘I don’t like ‘im, and Night Wind don’t neither.’‘You’re cracked,’ Annie mutters. Doll rolls towards her. ‘Annie?’‘What?’‘Can we go ’ome tomorrer?’Annie doesn’t answer. Doll touches her. Annie is stiff. Her heart is beating in enormous slow thuds. ‘What’s up?’ Doll whispers. ‘Dollie,’ Annie breathes, ‘oh Dollie, I wasn’t sure. Can you hear it – can you? ’E’s coming.’’  With slow, hesitant steps, someone is mounting the stairs.‘Who?’ Doll’s voice rises. ‘Why are you scared?’ but she’s scared herself, she don’t know why. People go upstairs and down all night long in Fox and Goose Yard. But here? The ogre is coming. The footsteps reach the last of the carpeted steps, and pause. Then they come on more clearly, creaking up the bare wooden boards of the second half.  ‘I ain’t scared,’ says Annie, but she’s trembling and she grips Doll’s arm tight. ‘It’s Mr Eden, that’s all. I know what he wants.’‘What?’‘Oh Dollie,’ Annie breathes pityingly. ‘Din’t you ‘ear what Miss Mealy-Mouth Eliza said? About his wife? Who’s dead?’‘Yus…’‘Well then? E’s a man, ain’t ‘e? E’s got needs, same as Pa.’The wind shrieks over the rooftops like a wild hunt of the dead. ‘I gotta be a good girl now,’ whispers Annie. ‘Or ’e’ll frow us out.’Light blooms around the cracks outlining the door. Doll can hardly breathe. The knob twists with a squeak. The door opens. In comes the burning star of a candle. Mr Eden’s face floats behind it, white as a mask. The eyes are half-slits, the nose sharp, the eyebrows blanched and non-existent. He wears a long white night-shirt and nothing else.‘I am a sinner, yes,’ he whispers. ‘I am a sinner, but angels will protect her if she be pure. If she be pure. Let us put it to the test. Children, are you awake?’ ‘No,’ whispers Doll. But Annie sits up.He moistens his lips. ‘Look, she doesn’t shriek. A man in the room and she doesn’t shriek. Will you come with me, child?’Annie ducks her head in a nod.  ‘Get out of bed.’She swings her legs out and slides to the floor. ‘I see you understand me quite well. Will you do as you’re told, Annie?’She gives an awkward, lopsided shrug. ‘Yes, sir…’He shivers. His eyes reflect two brilliant pinpricks from the candleflame. ‘I knew it. God would protect a virgin, but from such as these His eyes are turned away. It will not be so great a sin.’ He pulls her out of the room by her wrist. ‘Leave ’er be!’ screams Doll, sitting bolt upright. ‘She don’t like you!  She ‘ates you!  Leave ’er be!’  Feet stumble downstairs; the room darkens as the candlelight dwindles. Doll sits rigid in the bed, pierced by a terror she doesn't understand. The wind crashes against the window and wails around the house. She flings off the covers, jumps out, and runs on to the landing, and a door shuts softly down below. It’s so very dark! She hugs herself, panting, shivering, listening, waiting... till there’s a muffled cry: ‘I don’t want to! Let me go!’Doll rushes down the attic stairs to the main landing. A platform of nightmares and ghosts, every door is shut, the stairwell’s a black pit, nowhere is safe. ‘Annie, Annie, Annie!’ She jigs from foot to foot - screaming, she can’t stop. ‘Miss Elizabeth, Miss Elizabeth! Pa! Pa, I want you! Annie! Miss Elizabeth, where are you? Miss Elizabeth, Miss Elizabeth!’A door jerks open. In a swift-footed, dark rush, Miss Elizabeth is upon her. No candle this time, no lamp. With a pounce she seizes Doll and shakes her. ‘I told you not to come down! Not to come down!’ A stinging slap lands on Doll’s cheek and ear. ‘Go back upstairs this instant!’   ‘E’s got – Annie,’ hiccups Doll in a voice clotted with tears and snot. Miss Elizabeth drags and throws her against the thinly carpeted attic steps. ‘Upstairs!’ she hisses, and there’s a sharp sweaty stink from under her armpits, and Doll knows Miss Elizabeth is afraid. It terrifies her. She scrabbles upstairs on all fours, sobbing. Her nightgown rips. A splinter skewers her palm. Below her, Miss Elizabeth’s bedroom door shuts with force. Doll turns, desperate as a little caged animal that throws itself again and again at the bars.  With a wild shriek, the night wind tears at the roof. ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ it cries. Or maybe ‘Let it out, let it out!’ A wind to wake the dead. ‘Night Wind, help!’ sobs Doll. And all at once she knows what to do. Let out the thing in the room. The locked room.She tiptoes back down. The forbidden door is a tall darkness near the top of the stairs. And something behind it is patting along the panels, scratching at the doorframe. Doll clutches the cold china knob. It twists under her fingers but won’t open. There’s no key. And now she remembers dropping it. She flings herself down, sweeping her palms over the gritty varnish of the floorboards at the edge of the rug, while just over her head the knob rotates viciously, rattling this way and that.  The draught hisses under the door, and a sweet cold stench flows into her face.  Her sweeping hand touches cold, shaped metal. She snatches it up. Her exploring fingers find the keyhole. She thrusts the key in, turns it. And falls into the room on hands and knees as the door is dragged suddenly open.  Something leaps over her, a rustling blur in the grainy darkness, a grey shape.  It rushes across the landing trailing foul air, and throws open Mr Eden’s bedroom door. For a second, framed in the doorway is the outline of a woman in a crinoline dress. It looks back once over its shoulder. A glimmer of forehead. Pitted eyes.It vanishes inside.  Doll runs after, she has to, she’s drawn. A candle burns on the mantelshelf like a cruel star. She sees a tall fourposter bed, the sheets torn back. She sees Mr Eden. She hears him panting. Under him is Annie, nightgown pulled up, the pillow over her face. A handful of bones closes around the candle flame and nips it out.  Something pounces on the bed. There’s a sharp, terrible scream from Mr Eden: ‘Ellen!’ Then only thrashing and struggling, a sound of ripping and the sudden iron smell of blood. ‘Annie!’ Doll screams, ‘Annie, where are you?’There’s a thump, then somebody’s running, gasping and crying. Too dark to see, but Doll knows it’s Annie. She darts into the room. They seize each other, their hands collide, their fingers lock in an unbreakable grip. They go bumping through the doorway, stumble across the landing, dive up the attic stairs as Miss Elizabeth’s door flies open. Her footsteps drum across the landing. Annie and Doll reach the turn of the stairs where the carpet ends. They scramble into the garret, slam the door, spring on the bed as if it’s an island in a dangerous sea and cling to each other. Miss Elizabeth’s muffled, choking screams seem to go on for ever, but at last they stop. The wind whoops around the gables. ‘What’ll we do?’ Doll shivers. ‘That fing's down there. I daren’t go down, I daren’t. I daren’t ever go down now, Annie. What’ll we do?’‘Nuffink,’ Annie answers in a dull voice. ‘We ain’t even got our own clothes. We’re stuck.’‘I wanta go home!’ Doll weeps.‘What’s the use?’ says Annie in the same dull voice, and she smoothes Doll’s hair. ‘We’d be on the streets again tomorrer. Pa can’t keep us, Dollie. E don’t even want us. Nobody does.’Doll sits up.‘Night Wind does!’ She pulls away from Annie’s arms and jumps off the bed. Scurries to the little dormer window and wrestles with the catch. ‘Annie, help me!’ ‘What are you on about?’ says Annie, but she comes and helps. The sash is stuck tight, but with an effort they fling it up. Doll leans out into the gale. The cold blast clears her head and dries her tears. She looks into the sky. High up there, far beyond the roof of the neat white church in the square, Night Wind is rushing towards them, filling the sky. Her arms are outstretched promontories of cloud. She’s lit from below by the dingy glare of the sugar refineries, the iron foundries and brass foundries, the charcoal works, the flaring gaslights of the Blackwall Railway and the Commercial Road. Her wild breath smells of smoke and  sulphur, of smuts and salt and cold rain. Her black sooty hair whirls around her face and streams away in mile-long tendrils, coiling and spreading over all of London. Her eyes are bright and stern as stars.‘See? See?’ gasps Doll as Annie pushes in beside her. ‘There she is! There’s Night Wind!’‘I see her!’ Annie cries.  She clasps her hands. ‘I do see her! Oh she’s beau’iful. She’s beaut’iful, Doll – but she won’t want the likes of us.’‘She does!’ Doll shrieks. ‘She asked me to play on the rooftops. She looks arter all the children what get lost. She told me so. Come on!’ She puts her hands on the sill and kicks herself up and out of the window. ‘Doll!’But Doll is clambering out. The garret window sticks out from the slanted tiles  like an eye with an eyebrow. It peeps over a drainage gulley at the edge of the roof,  bordered by a parapet. Doll’s never been this high before. Only the smoking chimneys are higher, thrusting into the sky with their rows of pots. The slanting slates are wet and cold. Her bare feet stick to them, and her nightdress whips like a flag. She clings to the blistered wooden window frame, bending to peer back into darkness. ‘Annie, come on!’Annie puts her elbows on the sill and wriggles out of the window. She rolls, swinging her feet around. There are dark stains on her nightdress. She takes Doll’s hand and together they skid down to the very edge of the roof. They stand behind the parapet, which comes up to Annie’s knees, and look into the air. And running ahead of her come Night Wind’s children – hundreds of them, pouring over the housetops in a dark stream, dancing with wild, desperate gaiety. They fling themselves at the roof and their feet patter up and over the slates with a noise like hailstones. Girls and boys, come out to play…Night Wind is calling them. Her voice gusts towards them, full of the chiming of church bells, the clatter of the railway, the echo of hooves and rattle of hackney carriages, the scraping of fiddles and stamp of dancing feet, the shouts of the street sellers, the lost-soul cries of gulls on the river, the unending blended roar of unsleeping London. ‘Come where you belong,’ she seems to call. ‘Out here with me. No one else cares, but I’ll look arter you. Come and join the fun…’They’re on the parapet now – on the very edge of the building, high above the street. They look at each other. Doll squeezes Annie’s hand. And they jump out into the arms of the night wind.

 

© Katherine Langrish 2019Picture credits: The illustration of  'Night Wind' is by Dalziel after Arthur Hughes, illustration for George Macdonald's 'At the Back of the North Wind'All other illustrations are from Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold's 'London: A Pilgrimage'.

The 'man in the oke' and other bugaboos

 
I do love lists. Especially lists of mysterious creatures, like the well-known one by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a book in which he takes the robustly sceptical line that even if witches, ghosts and fairies do exist, most actual instances of them are a load of old cobblers: ‘One knave in a white sheete hath cousened and abused many,’ he declares. ‘Miracles are knaveries, most commonly.’

But in Chapter XV comes his famous, breathlessly delivered list of supernatural creatures fit to be believed only by those who ‘through weaknesse of mind and bodie, are shaken with vain dreames and continuall feare’:

In our childhood our mothers’ maids have so terrified us … with bull beggars, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, Kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadows: in so much as some never fear the divell but on a darke night; and then a polled sheep is a perilous beast and manie times is taken for oure father’s soul, specialie in a churchyard…

This may or may not be a true indication of the range of creatures the Elizabethan populace actually believed in (satyrs, fauns, nymphs? really?) but it’s a magnificent rant. It’s as though Scot has thrown together every single supernatural entity he can possibly think of: you can see how one suggests another. The classical ‘satyrs, pans, fauns, syl[v]ans’ run together easily, while ‘Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine’ seem more homely night terrors. While many of them are still familiar, others are not. Bull beggars? Spoornes, calcars? What on earth are they? And it's hard to see how anyone could be frightened by the dimunitive Tom Thumb we know from the fairy tales, but perhaps in the 16th century he was more of a plaguey fairy nuisance like Puck. At any rate his name seems to have suggested ‘Tom Tumbler’ of whom we know nothing.




In her Dictionary of Fairies Katharine Briggs says there is or was a ‘Bullbeggar Lane’ in Surrey which ‘once contained a barn haunted by a bull beggar’. Did it have any resemblance to a bull, or was it some more ordinary bogeyman? ‘Kit with the Canstick’ or ‘candlestick’ is probably a variety of will o’ the wisp, leading travellers astray, but I know of no folktales about it and if I were writing one I'd be tempted to turn it into a domestic spirit, and a sinister one at that. What is a ‘calcar’? I’ve no idea, unless it could by some stretch be a corruption of the Gaelic ‘Cailleach’ – divine hag or old woman. What ‘the spoorne’ might be, no one knows. (Spawn?) The ‘mare’ is the night-mare. The hell-waine is the Devil’s wagon in which he carries souls to hell. In my children's fantasy 'Dark Angels' there's a hill called Devil's Edge, loosely based on Stiperstones in Shropshire; it has earned its name because:


Up on the very top ... there was a road.  A road leading nowhere, a road no one used. For if anyone was so bold as to walk along it, especially at night, he’d hear the clamour of hounds and the blowing of horns, the cracking of whips and the rumbling of a cart.  And out of the dark would burst the Devil’s own dog pack, dashing beside a black wagon drawn by goats with fiery eyes, crammed full of screaming souls bound for the pits of Hell.

As for the ‘man in the oke’, Katherine Briggs tells of '…scattered reference to oakmen in the North of England, though very few folktales about them…. Most people know the rhyming proverb “Fairy folks live in old oaks”; the Gospel Oak or King’s Oak in every considerable forest had probably a traditional sacredness from unremembered times, and an oak coppice in which the young saplings had sprung from the stumps of unfelled trees was thought to be an uncanny place after sunset…'

Many, many years ago I tried to write a poem about how it might feel to change into a tree:



I lie on oak leavesAnd green, fronded moss:Colder than new sheetsThe earth and the frost.
Tree-roots twine under me,Lulled, hushed I lieWith open face staringInto the sky –
Bark sheathes my body andOh now I amNot the tree’s prisonerBut the oke-man.
White sap runs in my veins,Blood in the tree,Leaves spout from my two arms,Green as can be…


            There was a vast and ancient Chêne Jupitre or ‘Jupiter Oak’ in the Forest of Fontainebleau when I lived near there in the 1990’s, but it became dangerous and was taken down.


I’m sure Scot's list (which of course he knew) inspired the list of evil creatures named by CS Lewis in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe  –  the ones who gather behind the White Witch at the Stone Table.

Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book – Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horror, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses and Ettins. 
Even more exuberant is a list of supernatural creatures compiled by Michael Aislabie Denham (he died in 1859) a well-read Yorkshire merchant who collected and published various ‘Rhymes, Proverbs, Sayings, Prophecies, Slogans, etc.’ as well as pamphlets and anecdotes. Denham goes even further than Reginald Scot, whose list is incorporated – one might almost say buried – in the midst of his own: many of the creatures he names here appear nowhere else, but one must assume that they were once genuine traditions. Some are ancient. 'Portunes', for example, are to be found only in a single instance in the De Nugis Curialium or Courtly Trifles of 12th century man-of-letters Walter Map, who describes them as tiny fairy creatures like little old men who toast frogs in the hearth-ashes at night.

It's highly unlikely Denham found any live oral tradition about portunes in the mid-19th century, and there's little chance of the name leaking back from the written to the oral tradition, since Map's Latin text was not published until 1850, nor translated into English until MR James's edition of 1914. So Denham is certainly overstating the case when he suggests that 'portunes', at least, were generally believed in ‘seventy or eighty years ago’. At this time, he claims,

... the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, Bloody Bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, spectres, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles, korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost. Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its spectre, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!

Did you notice the 'hobbits', about two-thirds of the way through? All I can say is that here, indeed, is scope for the creative imagination.





Picture credits:

Witch and familiars: by Arthur Rackham
The fairy 'Yallery Brown': by John Batten
Aslan in the power of the White Witch: by Pauline Baynes 
From 'Goblin Market': by Arthur Rackham

Folklore snippets: The Gwyllion

From ‘British Goblins’ by Wirt Sikes, 1880
The Gwyllion are female fairies of frightful characteristics, who haunt lonely roads in the Welsh mountains and lead night-wanderers astray.  The Welsh word gwyll is variously used to signify gloom, shade, duskiness, a hag, a witch, a fairy and a goblin; but its special application is to these mountain fairies of gloomy and harmful habits, as distinct from the Ellyllon of the forest glades and dingles, which are more often beneficent. The Gwyllion take on a more distinct individuality under another name – as the Ellyllon do in mischievous Puck – and the Old Woman of the Mountain typifies all her kind. She is very carefully described… in the guise in which she haunted Llanhyddel Mountain in Monmouthshire. This was the semblance of a poor old woman, with an oblong four-cornered hat, ash-coloured clothes, her apron thrown across her shoulder, with a pot or wooden can in her hand, such as poor people carry to fetch milk in. always going before the spectator, and sometimes crying ‘Wow up!’ This is an English form of a Welsh cry of distress, ‘Wwb!’ or ‘Ww-bwb!’  Those who saw this apparition would be sure to lose their way…
When people first lost their way and saw her before them, they used to hurry forward and try to catch her, supposing her to be a flesh-and-blood woman who could set them right; but they never could overtake her, and she on her part never looked back; so that no man ever saw her face. She has also been seen on the Black Mountain in Breconshire.

Women Leaders of the Wild Hunt

As we head towards Hallowe'en - are there any female leaders of the Wild Hunt? The answer is yes, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever heard of a Valkyrie. Njal’s Saga tells of a man in Caithness named Dorrud, who on Good Friday sees ‘twelve people riding together to a women’s room’ who disappear inside. Looking in, he sees twelve women working on a loom. They use severed heads for the weights, and intestines for the thread. As they wind the finished cloth on to the loom beam, they chant a poem known as ‘The Song of the Spear’ which includes these lines:
Valkyries decidewho dies or lives...Let us ride swiftlyon our saddle-less horseshence from herewith swords in hand.Njal’s Saga, tr. Robert Cook (Penguin Classics)

The women pull down the cloth and tear it into pieces: each keeping a torn piece in her hand, they climb on their horses and ride away, six to the south and six to the north...In Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, Hilde Ellis Davidson cites an Old English charm known as Wið færstice - Against sudden pain’ (probably cramp or stitch), which visualises the pain as ‘caused by the spears of certain supernatural women’:

Loud were they, lo, loud, riding over the hill.They were of one mind, riding over the land,Shield thyself now, to escape from this ill.Out, little spear, if herein thou be.Under shield of light linden I took up my standWhen the mighty women made ready their powerAnd sent out their screaming spears…

Davidson thinks this may once have been a battle-spell, though the charm addresses supernatural causes of pain – elf-shot, witch-shot, gods’-shot – rather than human. (Cramps do seem to come out of nowhere…)  In another Old English charm a swarm of bees is addressed as sigewif, ‘victory-women’. This implies that Anglo-Saxons correctly assumed worker bees to be female - a fact which was neither obvious, nor scientifically proved until the late 18th century. At any rate, the image conjured up is a flying host of warrior women, armed with stings.

Gold plaques embossed with bee goddesses, 7th C Rhodes. British MuseumIn England one Wild Hunt still possesses a female leader. In Shropshire, the Lady Godda rides the hills with her partner Wild Edric at the head of their troop. First recorded in the late 12thcentury account of Walter Map, the tale tells  how the lord of the manor of Ledbury North, Edric Salvage (he's a real person, named in Domesday Book) snatches an unnamed fairy woman he has found dancing with her sisters in a cottage in the woods. She marries him on condition he must never reproach her with her fairy origin: when he breaks this prohibition she vanishes and Edric dies. However, as Katharine Briggs remarks in A Dictionary of Fairies: 'Tradition restored him to his wife, and they rode together over the Welsh borders for many centuries after his death.’  To see them was unlucky. Charlotte Burne in Shropshire Folklore (1883) knew a servant girl who as a child had seen them with her own eyes: by this time, this fairy lady had acquired a name:

It was in 1853 or 1854 or, just before the Crimean War broke out.  She was with her father, a miner, at Minsterley, and she heard the blast of a horn. Her father bade her cover her face, all but her eyes, and on no account speak, lest she should go mad. Then they all came by; Wild Edric himself on a white horse at the head of the band, and the Lady Godda his wife, riding at full speed over the hills.

Hold that thought please! -  and read this account from Jacob Grimm.

There was once a rich lady of rank named frau Gauden; so passionately she loved the chase, that she let fall the sinful word, ‘could she but always hunt, she cared not to win heaven’. Four-and-twenty daughters had dame Gauden, who all nursed the same desire. One day, as mother and daughters in wild delight hunted over woods and fields and once more that wicked word escaped their lips, that ‘hunting was better than heaven,’ lo, suddenly before their mother’s eyes the daughters’ dresses turn into tufts of fur, their arms into legs, and four-and-twenty bitches bark around their mother’s hunting car, four doing duty as horses, the rest encircling the carriage; and away goes the wild train into the the clouds, there betwixt heaven and earth to hunt unceasingly as they had wished, from day to day, from year to year.

They have long wearied of the wild pursuit, and lament their impious wish, but they must bear the fruits of their guilt till the hour of redemption comes. Come it will, but who knows when? During the twölven* (for at other times we sons of men cannot perceive her) frau Gauden directs her hunt towards human habitations; best of all she loves on the night of Christmas eve or New Year’s eve to drive through the village streets, and wherever she finds a street door open, she sends a dog in. Next morning a little dog wags his tail at the inmates, he does them no other harm but that he disturbs their night’s rest by his whining. He is not to be pacified or driven away. Kill him, and he turns into a stone by day, which, if thrown away, comes back to the house by main force and is a dog again at night. So he whimpers and whines the whole year round, brings sickness and death upon man and beast, and danger of fire to the house; not till the twölven comes round again does peace return to the house.

* twölven: the twelve nights of Yule or Christmas



Frau Gauden and the Lady Godda: both of them supernatural wild huntresses, and the names are surely too similar to be coincidence. But who was Frau Gauden? Grimm continues with another story:

Better luck befalls those who do Dame Gauden a service. It happens at times that in the darkness of night she misses her way and comes to a crossroad. Crossroads are to the good lady a stone of stumbling: every time she strays into such, some part of her carriage breaks, which she cannot herself rectify. In this dilemma she came, dressed as a stately dame, to the bedside of a labourer at Böck, awaked him and implored him to help her in her need. The man was prevailed on, followed her to the crossroads, and found one of her carriage wheels was off. He put the matter to rights, and by way of thanks for his trouble she bade him gather up in his pockets sundry deposits left by her canine attendants during their stay at the crossroads, whether as the effect of great dread or of good digestion. The man was indignant at the proposal … incredulous, yet curious, he took some with him. And lo, at daybreak, to his no small amazement, his earnings glittered like gold, and in fact it was gold.  He was sorry now that he had not brought it all away.

Notable here (apart from the enjoyable comic element) is that though like the Valkyries, Godda rides on a horse, Frau Gauden travels in a wagon, which seems a cumbersome thing to go hunting in. 



But...  here is a goddess or priestess riding on a wagon. It’s made of bronze and was found in a cremation grave of the 7th century BC, near Strettweg in Austria. The female figure in the middle who supports an offering bowl towers above a crowd of smaller figurines, male and female, some on horses. Facing outwards at both the front and back is a stag flanked by figures of indeterminate sex who are holding its antlers. There is of course no knowing for sure what all this may have meant, or of connecting it in any direct way to the Wild Hunt or to the wagons of Frau Gauden or Frau Holle. But deities in wagons are certainly known from prehistory. The Norse gods called the Vanir presided over fertility and the domestic arts: the two most powerful were brother and sister Freyr and Freyja – titles which mean simply ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’, and from which the word ‘Frau’ is derived.  


If a sly story told in the 14thcentury Icelandic Flateyjarbòk (the ‘Flat Island Book’) has any truth in it, an image of Freyr used to be taken about the Swedish countryside in a wagon accompanied by a priestess: the wagon gets stuck in a snowstorm and all the attendants desert it except the priestess and a young man called Gunnar. The two keep each other warm in the time-honoured way: a few months later when the priestess is discovered to be with child, the worshippers are delighted at the fertility of their ‘god’. It’s quite possible that Freyr’s sister Freyja also travelled in a wagon. A beautifully carved ceremonial wagon was placed in the Oseberg ship, itself the burial-place of two high-status women who may have been priestesses. Carefully dismantled wagons have been found in Danish bogs, presumably cult offerings.



The Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56-120) tells of a Danish goddess, Nerthus, who represented ‘Mother Earth’ and  whose occasional dwelling was a sacred wagon in a grove of trees on an island:

One priest, and only one, may touch it. It is he who becomes aware when the goddess is present in her holy seat; he harnesses a yoke of heifers to the car, and follows in attendance with reverent mien. Then are the days of festival, and all places which she honours with her presence keep holiday. Men lay aside their arms and go not to war; all iron is locked away … until the priest restores her to her temple, when she has had enough of her converse with mortals. Then the car and the robes and (if we choose to believe them) the goddess herself are washed in a mystic pool. Slaves are the ministers of this office, and are forthwith drowned in the pool. Dark terror springs from this, and a sacred mystery surrounds those rites which no man is permitted to look upon.

Tacitus, Germania, 40, tr. RB Townshend, 1894

Wagons are associated with yet another supernatural woman, Frau Holda. Grimm suggests she is originally a sky deity associated with the weather – and therefore able to move through the air. She appears in the Grimms' fairytales as the kindly but powerful Mother Holle (KHM 24) whose country the heroine arrives at by jumping down a well.

At last she came to a little house, out of which an old woman peeped; but she had such large teeth that the girl was frightened, and was about to run away. But the old woman called out to her,  ‘What are you afraid of, dear child? Stay with me; if you will do all the work in the house properly, you shall be the better for it. Only you must take care to make my bed well, and to shake it thoroughly till the feathers fly – for then there is snow on the earth. I am Mother Holle.’



'The Old Woman is plucking her geese' was the phrase my mother used when I was small... In a story very similar to the one about Frau Gauden, Mother Holle needs the linchpin of her wagon mended, and rewards the helpful peasant with the woodshavings left from his work: these too turn to solid gold.

But Holda had her dark side. ‘At other times,’Jacob Grimm continues, ‘Holda, like Wotan, can also ride on the winds, clothed in terror, and she, like the god, belongs to the ‘wütende heer’ [furious army]. From this arose the fancy, that witches ride in Holle’s company … in Upper Hesse and the Westerwald, Holle-riding, to ride with Holle, is equivalent to the witches’ ride.’ The souls of unbaptised infants were held to join Holle’s wild company.  

The unnamed author of a 9thcentury document called the Canon Episcopi denounces the folly of those who believe in witches and their power. ‘Have you shared in a superstition to which some wicked women have given themselves?’ he demands. ‘Fooled by demonic phantasms, they believe themselves in the hours of the night to ride with Diana the pagan goddess, with Herodias and with innumerable other women, mounted on the backs of animals and travelling great distances in the silence of the night.’



Diana or Artemis is an obvious Wild Huntress. Nor is it surprising that a cleric should place Herodias in the witches' wild hunt, though it’s worth noting his main point is that witches don’t exist, not that they do. (It took a long time for the church to pass from this relatively healthy scepticism to the crazed witchhunts of later centuries). Herodias is the name given in the Middle Ages to the girl who danced before Herod and asked him for the head of John the Baptist. Though known today as Salome, that name is not in the Gospels; some Greek versions read ‘Herod’s daughter Herodias’, while in  the Latin she is named only ‘the girl’ or ‘the daughter of Herodias’ - who was her mother. Jacob Grimm suggests that Herodias ‘was dragged into the circle of night-women … because she played and danced, and since her death goes booming through the air as the “wind’s bride”.’  Medieval poets really went to town on Salome/Herodias’ fate; Grimm quotes from a medieval Latin poem which gives this creepy account:

  From midnight to first cock-crow she sits on oaks and hazel-trees, the rest of her time she floats through the empty air. She was inflamed by love for John which he did not return: when his head is brought in on a charger she would fain have covered it with tears and kisses, but it draws back and begins to blow at her; she is whirled into empty space and there she hangs forever.




Frau Gauden and Frau Holle both have connections with crossroads. One of the many titles of the Greek goddess Hecate was ‘She of the crossroads’, and she was represented as three bodied, able to face in all directions.  Dogs were sacred to her, and she presided over thresholds and crossing-places, including the threshold between life and death. The dog is of course the guard-dog of the threshold into the underworld. According to Everyman’s Classical Dictionary Hecate was probably ‘a pre-Hellenic chthonian deity’ and Hesiod represents her as able, like the Norse Vanir, to gift mankind with wealth and all the blessings of daily life.  With her troop of ghosts and hell-hounds she visited crossroads where offerings of meat, eggs and fish were left for her. And in the 3rd century BC Argonautica, Medea tells Jason to sacrifice a ewe to Hecate, pour honey over the offering and leave without looking back – even if he hears the sound of footsteps or the baying of hounds. (Argonautica Book III lines 1020-1040)



Finally, what about the Breton legend of the Ankou who drives about the countryside in a cart, picking up souls? ‘At night,’ says the 19th century folklorish the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, ‘a wain is heard coming along the road with a creaking axle. It halts at the door, and that is the summons.’ The Ankou is a male figure, but as Baring Gould points out:

The wagon of the Ankou is like the death-coach that one hears of in Devon and Wales. It is all black, with black horses drawing it, driven by a headless coachman. A black hound runs before it, and within sits a lady – in the neighbourhood of Okehampton and Tavistock she is supposed to be a certain Lady Howard, but she is assuredly a personification of Death, for the coach stops to pick up the spirits of the dying.

This brings us back to the valkyries again – psychopomps, the choosers of the slain.

It’s hardly possible or even desirable to come up with a single explanation for stories of the Wild Hunt, but it does seem to me that its female leaders are even more complex in origin than the males. The leaders of most British Wild Hunts have assumed the names and characters of local heroes such as Edric Salvage, Hereward, King Arthur, Sir Francis Drake, a tendency which makes them somehow easier to grasp, more comprehensible. But the only remaining British Wild Huntress, Lady Godda, has a name similar to the German Frau Gauden, stories of whom include items – wagons, dogs, crossroads – reminiscent of ancient goddesses such as Nerthus and Hecate who held sway over domestic affairs such as fertility and farming, which literally implies over life and death.  And since the Wild Hunt has always been associated with death, its appearance in tales from Germany and Scandinavia also suggest the weaving in of a separate strand of bloody battle-spirits. Hilda Davidson thinks the valkyries may originally have been believed to devour the dead of the battlefield, rather than merely, as later, to escort them to Valhalla.

Herodias, whirling in the windy blast from the lips of John the Baptist’s severed head – Frau Gauden with her carriage and her dogs and their golden poo – Lady Godda riding on her white horse in her green gown like many a later Queen of Elfland – the phantasmal spear-women galloping over the hill while drops of blood shake from their horses’ manes – the lady in the black death-coach – these are wonderfully various stories which deserve to be better known.


Picture credits:


Hilde, one of the valkyries, by Ludwig Pietsch, 1894


Frigga or Frau Gode hunting, by Ludwig Pietsch, 1894


Gold plaques embossed with winged bee goddesses, perhaps the Thriai, found at Camiros Rhodes, dated to 7th century BCE (British Museum)


Strettweg cult wagon, photo by Thilo Parg, Wikimedia Commons  


Nerthus in her wagon, by Emile Doepler (1855-1922)


Goldmarie shaking Mother Holle's bedding, by Herman Vogel (1854-1921)


The Wild Hunt, by Peter Nicolai Arbo, 1831-1892


Salome dancing before Herod, by Gustave Moreau, Wikimedia Commons


Valkyries leading the slain to Valhalla, by Ludwig Pietsch, 1894