Little wonders

As a camera-person, I watch the world with a photographer's eye, but I don't always have a camera with me. This means that so many pictures never materialize, except in my memory. My magical day yesterday was a day of animal wonders. I never expected that, having driven my mother to the airport, I would see on the return to the city a whole herd of dear grazing among the trees near the highway. The meadow with the mist-covered mountains behind seemed transformed by the presence of these beautiful, peaceful creatures, making a picture I can never show but only tell of. Later that day, I had to go take care of an errand in one of those suburban office parks with man-made lakes and benches for the workers to commune with grass and trees during a break. As I always do in a place like that, I parked my car facing the little lake. When I came out from the building an hour later, a large grey Canadian goose was contentedly sitting in front of my car, close to a pile of pine cones I had not noticed before that looked like a pile of treasure, tempting me to imagine the goose collecting them, as surely he might have done in a story I haven't read yet.

Tread Softly for you Tread on my Dreams

Queenie Chan’s “The Dreaming” is a dark comic set in the bush of Australia. The use of images and the plot are beautifully combined to create a gripping and creepy tale. The main character Jeanie navigates the reader through the confusing world of haunting, superstition and missing girls. She is the hero trying to protect the school and her sister. But at the same time, she only half believes the mysterious aspects of the school. Her sister Amber is positive that the school is wrong and evil. The tale is intriguing and a page turner.

A horror story plays out for Jeanie as she follows painted images that reflect the disappearances of the girls at her school. The images are well done, cryptic and lovely. The paintings mesh so well into the plot it seems not a detail, but a reality of the world the girls live in. In addition to the incredible paintings are the characters themselves. They are realistic and vibrant causing a reader to care what happens to the girls trapped in the bush. As the story progresses fairy tale and Aborigine mythology elements are added. The story is layered and complex though the manga is only three volumes.

Overall I give it a 4.5 out of 5.

Afraid to sleep,
J.R. West the Raccoon

Faye Stories Part 1: Extending Fairy Tales

Donna Jo Napoli has a gift. She is an accomplished youth writer who specializes in a very unique genre. Napoli writes fairy tales. However, do not expect the old school Grimm or Anderson. Napoli takes stories, some that are familiar and some that aren't, and expends them into full novels that answer all of the questions that short stories leave.

Donna Jo Napoli's possibly most famous piece is "Zel", a retelling of Repunzel. Instead of a story about a girl locked in a tower, we get a story of a girl. Zel, who like the original tale is raised in a tower by a witch who owned a garden, is a strong willed girl who is curious. It is not the story of a witch stealing a child, but a witch holding onto childhood. Zel is not trapped in the tower until she shows signs of maturing into a woman. Her "mother" so appalled by puberty and Zel's growing desire for men, that she is locked away. The witch stole a child, and then stole that child's ascent into womanhood. Napoli took a simple love story, and made it a deeply personal tale.

My favorite Napoli story is "Beast," a Beauty and the Beast story where Beauty only shows up in the last two chapters. How did the Beast fall from manhood? Where is he from? How long was he a Beast? Napoli answers all those tales, giving the man under the animal skin a real story. Additionally, "Bound" takes Cinderella into China drawing on ancient forms of the story from the Middle Kingdom. She spins a story about a girl not with fairy feet, but with large unbound feet. "Breath" makes the piped-piper story about those in the village. About their descent into madness and fear. "Sirena" gives us a look into the ancient Greek tale of Philotectes from the Trojan War and the Sirens from the Odyssey. The sirens have a turn to tell their story through Napoli.

Napoli takes stories that we have heard and expands them into epic tales about characters we might have overlooked. She has a gift to give voices to those long forgotten. If you get a chance pick up some of her work.

Rereading stories from her childhood,
J.R. West the Raccoon

Estonia: Coins in the Ground

Craving an authentic national faith, Estonians have been drawn to the animistic religions that preceded Christianity: Taarausk, whose god was worshiped in forest groves, and Maausk, which translates as “faith of the earth.”

Ancient beliefs have survived in the form of folk tales. In stories, the sins of humans reverberate in nature — lakes fly away to punish greedy villagers, or forests wander off in the night, never to return. Trees demand the respect of a tipped hat, and holes in the ground must be fed with coins.

That quotation is from a feature in Monday's New York Times that another writer shared on the Sur La Lune message board. The article, entitled "A Hole in the Ground Erupts, to Estonia's Delight," details folk traditions around the geyser known as the Witch's Well of Tuhala:

According to legend, the witches of Tuhala were taking a sauna underground, beating each other vigorously with birch branches, oblivious to the commotion they were creating on the surface.

The article is very well worth the read - both detailed and deeply respectful of its subject. There is also an elegaic note, as the article notes how a local project to build a limestone quarry may drain the waters, making this year's eruption of the Witch's Well the last.

For a little more Baltic lore -- or in this case Scandinavian -- read our post on the stromkarl, the talented though dangerous spirit of springs and waterfalls, or you can read Isabella's compelling translation of The Fossegrim in a previous issue of Dante's Heart.

You can also read here the tale of a Canadian storyteller who rejected a $40,000 scholarship so that she could instead travel to Norway and live with the Sami reindeer herders, to rediscover the stories and language of her ancestors. Now, wearing boots of reindeer fur, she brings to children rhyming tales from the far north, recited from memory.

Does anyone know more folklore from that part of the world (beyond the Finnish Kalevala and of course the mythologies and sagas of Norway and Iceland)? What stories would you turn our attention toward, and what folk traditions? Such tales as those of the fossegrim and the traditions around the Witch's Well alert us that there is a beautiful and very ancient tradition of tales and lookings-at-the-world in that northern place, but surprisingly little of it has reached the attention of the West.

Daniel

Terri Windling's "Feline Folklore"

Happy Thanksgiving to our readers in the U.S.! Just before the holiday, I thought I would give everyone a link to a wonderful, brief article I have found on Feline Folklore. The article is by Terri Windling, author of The Wood Wife and co-editor of the former Journal of Mythic Arts, which we miss. The article is a wonderful tracing of cat lore across cultures and centuries, from the early associations of the cat with the mother goddess to recent retellings of fairy tales by such luminaries as Jane Yolen and others. Someone had asked on Sur La Lune if anyone knew of a fairy tale in which a human princess gives birth to kittens, and that set me on the track.

I offer the first paragraph of Windling's essay here, and I hope you will read the whole article:

A friend of mine once dreamed that she was in the throes of giving birth — not an unusual dream for a woman to have, but in this case instead of a human child, she gave birth to a litter of kittens. "Were you frightened?" I asked. "Not at all," she replied. "In fact, strange as it sounds, it was quite a lovely experience." I thought of my friend when I read Laurie Kutchin's poem "Birthdream," published in The New Yorker: "This time I had given birth to a child with a remarkable tail. Part animal, part girl. . . . I held her briefly in my arms, stroked her tail before we parted, her eyes nursing the dark moons. . . ."

Also, if you know of other tales in which a human mother gives birth to kittens, please visit Sur La Lune and add your knowledge to their message board. The only other tale I have been able to find is an Indian folktale, Roshni's Feast, in which a child is exchanged for a kitten in the cradle.

If you don't know of Sur La Lune already, it is a wonderful site that includes both a thriving message board devoted to fairy tales, and an online encyclopedia of fairy tales. So very worth checking out.

The painting above is Gertrude Jekyll's nineteenth-century Puss in Boots.

Daniel
Editor, Dante's Heart

The Ainu are making a return in Japan

Dear readers, here is an article describing a revival of interest in the folk traditions of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan. I read about them long ago in a history text and wondered if they had entirely disappeared from history...but it is not so. Though perhaps less than 20 living individuals speak the Ainu language, there are now, for the first time in many long centuries, Ainu dancers performing on Japanese stages:

For someone who grew up ashamed of her ethnic identity, they are powerful words.

"You are beautiful just as you are. Don't be afraid," Mina Sakai sings to a young, enthusiastic crowd in the language of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan.

The article I've linked to above focuses on the efforts of Ainu Rebels, a group of a dozen young artists who are fighting to fuse contemporary popular culture with traditional motifs from their own traditions:

In one number, several young women — dressed in typical Ainu blue and purple robes and headbands with bold, geometric patterns — danced in a circle while young men brandished bows and arrows, all to a throbbing techno beat that filled the small concert hall at a recent music festival in Sapporo, the capital of Japan's northern island of Hokkaido.

The article is well worth reading, as it tells the tale of an island people almost entirely forgotten by the rest of the world. The photograph shown below is from another article focused on an Ainu music festival that occurred a few months ago.


Nothing is more critical to the growth of our cultural imagination than the cross-pollination of mythic traditions, the trading of stories between one people and another. What beauty awaits us, and what opportunities for fresh stories and fresh views on our own lives, when we are given at last the gift of Ainu stories, which have had so few listeners? It is said that when an old man or an old woman dies, it is a library burning to the ground. How much of a library is lost to us, when a people with their accumulated lore are hidden away for centuries?

A small collection of Ainu myths and lore is available in English here.

A Contemporary Skald

This weekend in Kitchener, Ontario there is a remarkable event: the third annual Latitudes Storytelling Festival, which brings storytellers from traditions around the world together to tents set up in a Canadian park, where children gather to listen. I learned of the event this morning from an article in The Record. The article itself tells a compelling story about a storyteller, which I excerpt here for you:

Saturday and Sunday afternoon on the island, storytellers from various cultural backgrounds including Irish, Kenyan, Persian, Muslim and Jewish will read published stories, recite from memory or craft tales on the spot.

Waterloo Region native Sarah Granskou never intended to become a storyteller. But at Trent University, she "got in cahoots" with her oral history professor and grew skeptical of modern reliance on the written word.

She subsequently turned down a $40,000 scholarship in favour of moving to Norway and to live with the Sami reindeer herders of the North. Granskou wanted to learn Scandinavian languages and recover the culture of her ancestors.

"I had to learn poems, songs and fiddle tunes eye-to-eye without the vices of the written word," she says. "It was a very sacred, life-changing experience."

One of the first tasks she set for herself was to memorize a medieval song with 52 verses.

"I got thinking about how this survived and the mental resources it would take," she says.

She also worked on Norwegian farms and lived among the Inuit. Along the way, Granskou learned to play the jaw harp, willow flute and eight-string Hardanger fiddle and composed new lyrics for established Scandinavian melodies. "I was carrying that oral culture into a contemporary realm."

Back home in Waterloo Region, Granskou lost the use of her arms temporarily, during a lengthy illness. Unable to write or play fiddle, she spent hours talking to herself and composing the stories she now performs as a contemporary "Canwegian" skald, or Nordic bard.

"The beauty of stories is their ability to move and touch you in such a way that you don't need to define what you're learning. It doesn't have to be a lecture," she says.

She brings her repertoire of rhyming tales about fantastical trolls and family experiences to the children's tent Saturday and Sunday, along with a four-pointed red hat and boots made of reindeer fur.

I am reminded of the many storytellers who would rush out into the backwoods in Finland in the mid nineteenth century in an effort to meet with the last surviving oral storytellers (some of whom had a repertoire of tens of thousands of lines of verse) and learn from them.

At the moment I am jealous of the children in Victoria Park, who will be listening to Scandinavian tales tomorrow.

The Ethiopian King's Bow

I am reading Herodotus of Halicarnassos again, as I try to do every few years. Herodotus is a cunning storyteller, and his Histories was the Book of Gold for me as a teen. I have just found this story: when Cambyses of the Persians, after conquering Egypt, sent spies into Ethiopia to discover its weaknesses, the king of that land confronted the spies in this way:

Your king is not a just man--for were he so, he had not coveted a land which is not his own, nor brought slavery on a people who never did him any wrong. Bear him this bow, and say, -- 'The king of the Ethiops thus advises the king of the Persians -- when the Persians can pull a bow of this strength thus easily, then let him come with an army of superior strength against the long-lived Ethiopians -- till then, let him thank the gods that they have not put it into the heart of the sons of the Ethiops to covet countries which do not belong to them.'

How proud, that speech! That people were of course a foot taller than the Persians of that time, and the king must have seemed very imposing.

The test of the bow is a motif in many ancient legends. I am reminded especially of Rama in Hindu myth, who passes the test of stringing the bow of Shiva (see the portrait) - in fact passes the test so well that the bow breaks when he strings it!

What other myths or stories use this test?

Looking for a lost book of giants

Dear readers,

I'm afraid the details I'll be able to give are so vague as to be of very little help, but I long to find again an illustrated storybook that my speech pathologist read to me when I was a child (this would have been the mid 80s, though the book may be older than that). The book included lavishly colored illustrations of giants, and I have vague memories of one giant either walking over a hill or walking over a house set in a hill. The illustrations were very colorful. I think I had better do some memory meditations. One of the giants at least looked like Paul Bunyan - a great lumberjack fellow with a black beard.

If any of this sounds familiar, please let me know. Forgive the paucity of detail offered. I remember loving the book as a child and would love to find it again. Ever since that book I have had a fascination with giants....

The Seven Sages of Rome

By the way, if you haven't had the chance to yet, check out Roberta Payne's beautiful translation of The Seven Sages of Rome in our second issue of Dante's Heart. The Seven Sages is a very old cycle of folk tales, many of them quite dangerous: in these tales young women and old fathers are treacherous, and there is a price to be paid for ignoring the random wisdom of animals. My own favorites are "The Stolen Wife" and "The Jealous Man Locked Out of the House." What are yours?

"Their Mother Was a Fay..."

It has been a little while since very many people read Spenser, but The Faerie Queene is worth a second look. Spenser's poetry is unique in its enchantment and in the raw and visceral force of many of its images. For enchantment, consider this passage:

Their Mother was a Fay, and had the skill
Of secret things, and all the powers of nature
Which she by art could use unto her will,
And to her service bind each living creature....

Though I have no longing for power to bind living creatures, yet ah, for the skill of secret things! That is every scholar's wish and the wish of half the poets too.

Here is a passage for a raw and visceral velocity of sound and image (read this aloud, and you will see what I mean), one of my favorite passages on Dragons. The scaly beast has just been wounded, in battle with the Red Cross Knight:

For grief thereof, and devilish despite,
From his infernal furnace forth he threw
Huge flames, that dimmed all the heavens' light,
Enrolled in duskish smoke and brimstone blue;
As burning Aetna from his boiling stew
Doth belch out flames, and rocks in pieces broke,
And ragged ribs of mountains molten new,
Enwrapped in coalblack clouds and filthy smoke,
That all the land with stench, and heaven with horror choke.

Aetna, it is worth knowing, is the volcano that the Greeks named: "I burn."

If you haven't read Spenser in a while, look for a copy! Like every great writer of fairy tales and fantasies, he reminds us that the world in which we walk is full of hidden wonders and hidden monsters, even in the mundanity of our daily lives: he demands that we peer below the surface of our choices and our encounters. He demands - in the first lines spoken in The Faerie Queene - that we "be well aware." These are beautiful and perilous lives we live.

Drowned Giantesses

Dear readers, I stumbled into this eldritch passage in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson's Celtic Miscellany this weekend, and had to share it with you:

A woman, whose breasts had not grown, was cast up on a sea shore in Europe. She was fifty feet tall, that is from her shoulders to her feet, and her chest was seven feet across. There was a purple cloak on her. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her head had been cut off; and it was in this way that the wave cast her up on land.

Another woman was cast up from the sea in Scotland, and she was a hundred and ninety-two feet long; there were seventeen feet between her breasts, and sixteen was the length of her hair. and seven the length of the finger of her hand. Her nose was seven feet long, and there were two feet between her eyebrows. Every limb of her was as white as the swan or the foam of the wave.

Translated from the medieval Irish.

Ah, what do you make of that?

I love the combination of mathematical precision and poetic fervor: we are made to see the second of the drowned giantesses first as an engineer would - in measurements; but second, as a poet would - every limb of her was as white as the swan or the foam of the wave.

Stromkarl

Over at the Dutch artist Isabella's gallery, Land of the Dreamers, I ran into this depiction today - of Stromkarl, the Scandinavian water spirit, "riverman." Isabella says this of him:

It is said he knows how to play eleven different musical compositions, ten of them he plays often and anyone is free to listen. The eleventh he only plays at night as it could be dangerous for any living soul to hear it. It's said that when he plays the tune all things start to move from their places....

In fact, according to Brewer's Dictionary of folklore and fable, if anyone hears or plays the eleventh melody, "tables and benches, cups and cans, old men and women, blind and lame, babies in their cradles, and the sick in their beds, begin to dance."

What a beautiful and perilous folk figure Stromkarl must be! As wild as Orpheus with his lute. This is actually my first encounter with Stromkarl, and information on him is surprisingly scarce. Is he not well known in the West? Finding material on him is proving as tricky as carrying water in one's hands up a hill. I intend to begin raiding several local libraries and universities to learn more. I know a top-notch scholar of Scandinavian folklore whom I will have to interview shortly. I have located references both to Stromkarl as a character and to stromkarl as a plural of water spirits, a term analogous to naiad or selkie, rather than a name for an individual. Of depictions in art, so far I have only found Isabella's - even deviantart, that massive online catalogue of contemporary photos, paintings, and sketches, has no Stromkarl. If not for Brewer and a few other references, I might almost think Isabella had made him up. (I would be delighted by that.)

I have found one folktale that refers to stromkarl, actually while I was writing this very post. The written variant is very brief, and to be found in a truly ancient little piece of anthropology, a volume from 1841 entitled Fragments from German Prose Writers, translated in the UK by one Sarah Austin. As the fragment is brief, I will offer it in its entirety here:

Norwegian Legend:
Two little boys were playing by the side of the river, and they saw the Stromkarl, or water-spirit sitting on the shore and playing his harp. Then the children called out to him and said, "Stromkarl, why are you playing? There is no salvation for you." Thereupon the Stromkarl fell to weeping bitterly, threw his harp away, and sank in the deep waters. When the boys returned home they related to their father, who was a godly man, what had befallen them. The father said, "You have sinned against the Stromkarl,--go back and comfort him, and tell him that he too shall be saved." When they went back to the river, the Stromkarl sat on the shore weeping and lamenting. And the children said, "Weep not so, Stromkarl, our father says that thy Redeemer also liveth." Then the Stromkarl joyfully took his harp and played sweetly till the sunset.
Jacob Grimm. (Deutsche Mythologie.)

This is a curious version of the Norwegian, made the more so because it has been translated at least twice - once into German, again into English, and probably many more times as it circulated through German villages - and so this version probably suffers from outrageous replica failure - like the Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a print of some painting. And where does this odd tale find its theme and its origin? In the conflict between Christianity and paganism? In the nostalgia of a people for forgotten tales and old rites? Or in the joy of finding compatibility in two traditions? A very curious tale.

I wish I could find more on this stromkarl and his history. If anyone knows anything of him, drop us a comment here!

Earth, Sea, and Sky: or, Marvels of the Universe

That's the title of a beautiful late nineteenth-century book that I found in the back of a library a few years ago and that I haven't told nearly enough people about. It is a treasure. Remember Bastian Balthazar Bux's eyes when he stumbled through Mr. Coreandor's bookshop and just had to open up The Neverending Story? Those were my eyes when I found this old, dusty, leatherbound volume, with its over 300 engravings and its innumerable pages. The book offers short anecdotes on "all that is wonderful on the globe, in the waters, or in the starry heavens." The language of the book is Victorian and yet not - there is a vitality to its descriptions that is almost desperate. For example, in describing the earthquake that overtook Lisbon a few centuries ago, the book declares of such earthquakes: They bury mountains as we bury the dead.


In the aftermath of this decade's upheavals in Indonesia and Pakistan, we better than our fathers and mothers, perhaps, can feel the full horror and awe of that sentence. Although: what do we, who are here comfortably or somewhat comfortably blogging, know of that? Ask those starving among the bodies about horror.

But this is my favorite of all the books of that century. It is beautiful beyond hope. Take the first paragraph, for example, of one chapter:

There are beautiful creatures in the great deep with colors as gorgeous as those of butterflies; moreover, like butterflies, some of them have wings and rise like birds from the surface of the sea.

How well I remember a crossing from the white cliffs of Dover to Calais many years ago by ferry. I had never seen a flying fish, but that night by moonlight I saw three flashing above the darkness of water beside the ferry, carried so far north by some wild warm current. I watched them, rapt, as the first child must once have watched the first butterflies. And when I stumbled down onto the docks with my French pocket dictionary and a few coins in my pocket, all my mind was consumed by the thought: What beautiful things there are in the sea!

These days, thanks to the existence of the Internet, you can find a copy of Earth, Sea, and Sky on ebay or alibris, though once it must have taken a treasure hunt indeed.

Cryptozoo

If you haven't seen it, check out the ongoing Cryptozoo contest, a contest for Photoshopped images of creatures rumored to exist though never scientifically proven. (Now there is the key nostalgic myth of modern society: the myth of the unfound and exotic creature in some white space of the map - the hope that there are white spaces on the map.) Also check out Michael Newton's Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology: A Global Guide to Hidden Animals and Their Pursuers, a surprisingly thorough almanac to the many Bigfoots, yeti, and surviving dinosaurs of the world.


To whet the appetite, here are several of my own favorites from the Cryptozoo contest:



Kraken

Marine biologists - of the deep-diving, adventurous kind - are still searching for living specimens of architeuthis dux, the giant squid, which has the largest living eye of any animal, and which Walt Disney's rendition of 20,000 Leagues has made into an iconic creature. Clyde Roper in New England wrote a wonderful article once detailing his early research into the giant squid - I need to track down a copy - in which he described once preserving a part of a deceased, beached specimen in the deep freeze, and then trying it for dinner at a celebration with his fellow marine biologists. (Apparently in the high spirits of their knowledge-sharing, they were attacked by both the munchies and a case of extreme curiosity. Being a sushi lover, I can understand.) Roper reported that architeuthis dux tasted, regrettably, of ammonia.



Nessie

Not the masterpiece of the original black-and-white, but very classy. This particular Nessie looks like a very beautiful creature.


Sea Eaglephant

My hat goes off to this one. Not since Dumbo without his feather have I seen such grace from an elephant. Look at that leap!



Scuba Dive

Not the best art, but I love the audacity and suggestiveness of it!

Definitely visit Cryptozoo and check out the rest. I believe the contest is still in progress. You can even submit. Some of the entries are just terrible, but all of them are fun.