me you shall serve. You, like me, shall serve Dapplegrim. And he is not an easy master.
I grew up reading a blue hardbound multivolume illustrated set of fairy tales and myths the name of which I no longer remember, even though many of the stories and some of the illustrations I still carry around in the suitcase that is my skull. From there, I graduated to Andrew Lang’s compilations, and then I forgot about fairy tales for a while. It was only when I started reading the Brothers Grimm to my children that it became clear to what degree fairy tales had structured my thinking as a human and as a writer.
One of the tales I’ve thought about most over the years is the Norwegian folktale “Dapplegrim,” collected by Lang in his Red Fairy Book. It has an obsessiveness to it that I think is astounding, and I love the matter-of-fact way that slaughter becomes a founding principle for the story itself. I’ve always felt the story had a remarkably modern thrust to it, in the same way that some of the Icelandic Sagas, despite being written hundreds of years ago, do. My own telling of the tale tries to bring out what I think is psychologically implicit in the story. There’s a tone and a darkness to the original that I love, and I also love the notion of the horse itself as a kind of embodiment of the subconscious, an indication of a split within the psyche that both enables the narrator and that he feels enslaved to. The result is, I hope, something like Nick Cave’s updating of murder ballads: something true to the original which, despite maintaining the original setting, feels contemporary in attitude, mood, and thrust.
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM. The Wild Swans
HERE IN THE CITY LIVES A PRINCE WHOSE LEFT ARM IS LIKE ANY other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing. He’s a survivor of an old story. His eleven formerly enchanted brothers were turned from swans back into fully formed, handsome men. They married, had children, joined organizations, gave parties that thrilled everyone right down to the mice in the walls.
The twelfth brother, though, got the last of the magic cloaks, and his was missing a sleeve. So — eleven princes restored to manly perfection and one with a little something extra going on. That was the end of that story. “Happily ever after” fell onto everyone like the blade of a guillotine.
Since then, it’s been hard for the twelfth brother. The royal family didn’t really want him around, reminding them of their brush with the darker elements, stirring up their guilt about that single defective cloak. They made jokes about him, and insisted they were only meant in fun. His young nieces and nephews, the children of his brothers, hid whenever he’d enter a room and giggled from behind the chaises and tapestries. He grew introverted, which led many to believe that swanarmedness was also a sign of mental deficiency.
So finally he packed a few things and went out into the world. The world, however, was no easier than the palace had been. He could land only the most menial of jobs. Every now and then a woman got interested, but it always turned out that she was briefly drawn to some Leda fantasy or, worse, hoped her love could break the old spell and bring him his arm back. Nothing ever lasted long. The wing was graceful but large — it was awkward on the subway, impossible in cabs. It had to be checked constantly for lice. And unless it was washed daily, feather by feather, it turned from the creamy white of a French tulip to a linty, dispiriting gray.
He’s still around, though. He pays his rent one way or another. He takes his love where he can find it. In late middle age he’s grown ironic, and cheerful in a toughened, world-weary way. He’s become possessed of a wry, mordant wit. Most of his brothers back at the palace are on their second or third wives. Their children, having been cosseted and catered to all their lives, can be difficult. The princes spend their days knocking golden balls into silver cups or skewering moths with their swords. At night they watch the jesters and jugglers and acrobats perform.
The twelfth brother can be found most nights in one of the bars on the city’s outer edges, the ones that cater to people who were only partly cured of their spells and hexes, or not at all. There’s the three-hundred-year-old woman who got nervous when she spoke to the magic fish and found herself crying, No, wait, I meant young forever into a suddenly empty ocean. There’s the crownletted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him. In those places, a man with a single swan wing is considered lucky.
If you’re free one night, go out and find him. Buy him a drink. He’ll be glad to meet you, and he’s surprisingly good company. He tells a great joke. He has some amazing stories to tell.
When I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago my family had a copy of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, with beautiful, rather grotesque illustrations by Arthur Rackham, which I found so terrifying that I could not only not open the book but could not, on some of my more delicate days, enter the living room in which the book was shelved. This terror metamorphosed eventually, naturally, into fascination, and one day when I was six I forced myself to take down the book, open it, and gaze unflinchingly, unaccompanied, at its pictures. I believed that that day, I became a man.
I was particularly enamored of “The Wild Swans.” I’ll spare us all any meditations on the alluring power, to a rather odd suburban child, of a story that involved one of twelve princes who emerged at story’s end redeemed and restored up to a point, but destined to bear a swan’s wing instead of his right arm, because his beloved sister hadn’t had quite enough time to make all twelve of the required magic cloaks. What more could possibly be said about that?
KAREN JOY FOWLER. Halfway People
THUNDER, WIND, AND WAVES. YOU IN YOUR CRADLE. YOU’VE NEVER heard these noises before and they are making you cry.
Here, child. Let me wrap you in a blanket and my arms, take you to the big chair by the fire, and tell you a story. My father’s too old and deaf to hear and you too young to understand. If you were older or he younger, I couldn’t tell it, this story so dangerous that tomorrow I must forget it entirely and make up another.
But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it. So here, tonight, while I remember.
It starts with a girl named Maura, which is my name, too.
In the winter, Maura lives by the sea. In the summer, she doesn’t. In the summer, she and her father rent two shabby rooms inland and she walks every morning to the coast, where she spends the day washing and changing bedding, sweeping the sand off the floors, scouring, and dusting. She does this for many summer visitors, including the ones who live in her house. Her father works at a big hotel on the point. He wears a blue uniform, opens the heavy front door for guests and closes it behind them. At night, Maura and her father walk on tired feet back to their rooms. Sometimes it’s hard for Maura to remember that this was ever different.
But when she was little, she lived by the sea in all seasons. It was a lonely coast then, a place of rocky cliffs, forests, wild winds, and beaches of coarse sand. Maura could play from morning to night and never see another person, only gulls and dolphins and seals. Her father was a fisherman.
Then a doctor who lived in the capital began to recommend the sea air to his wealthy patients. A businessman built the hotel and shipped in finer sand. Pleasure boats with colored sails filled the fishing berths. The coast became fashionable, though nothing could be done about the winds.
One day the landlord came to tell Maura’s father that he’d rented out their home to a wealthy friend. It was just for two weeks and for so much money, he could only say yes. The landlord said it would happen this once, and they could move right back when the two weeks were over.
But the next year he took it for the entire summer and then for every summer after that. The winter rent was also raised.
