New Year, Resolutions and an Arthurian Sword

It's New Year's Day... And here is the Wart, on New Year's Day, pulling the
Sword from the Stone in the Disney cartoon of the same name. The film
 was based on TH White's The Once and Future King,

Happy New Year Everyone! Since people seem to be making resolutions and planning for 2015 I feel as if I should too, even though I know from past experience that I rarely stick to the lists I draw up. I’m toying with the idea of joining a couple of blogs. I like the idea of finding a bookish connection for every one of the traditional English counties, so Reading England 2015 sounds fun, but I don’t want to be tied down to too many books, so maybe I’ll aim for a lower level and just read half a dozen books for this one. And the What’s in a Name Challenge sounds fun - I could do this one easily using books from the TBR pile, and there aren’t that many books, so I’d still have plenty of time to read anything else that takes my fancy.

In addition, since most of my reading seems to be limited to British authors, and I am woefully ignorant about writers from other countries and cultures, I would like to try and read more foreign authors. I’ve got some Australian books on a shelf, and Zola and Balzac on the Kindle, so that would be a start!

Meanwhile, I seem to have gathered a pile of books by my armchair while ‘catching up’ on Radio 4 over the Christmas period– I love BBC Radio’s readings and dramatisations, and there have been some real goodies over the last couple of weeks. I’ve enjoyed TH White’s The Once and Future King, Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring and The Diary of a Provincial Lady, by EM Delafield, which are all old favourites so, of course, so I had to hunt out the books for some re-reading. And I’ve also ended up with a stash of other Arthurian books, and a copy of Christina Hardyment’s biography of Malory, which someone gave my mother, and she gave me!


A Walter Crane illustration of Arthur pulling the
sword from the stone.

Then there was Susanna Hislop’s Stories in the Stars: An Atlas of Constellations, a fascinating mix of myths and science, which had me standing out in the garden gazing at the stars and contemplating the universe. This book has been added to my Wish List, and I’m considering taking a trip out one night somewhere with a better view of the night sky – there are too many roofs and lights where we are, which is a shame, because there have been some lovely clear night skies while the weather has been so cold and frosty.

I’m looking forward to listening to Fay Weldon’s The Girls of Slender Means, which is the current Book at Bedtime (I like listening to serials in one fell swoop – I get frustrated with them because I want to know what happens, even when I’ve read the book!). And I’ll be glued to the radio for much of today for a marathon session of Tolstoy’s War and Peace – though I’m not sure I’ll remain uninterrupted until the end!

Anyway, from this surfeit of riches TH White’s The Once and Future King seems the most suitable inspiration for New Year, because it is New Year Year’s Day when Arthur pulls the sword from the stone. If you remember, the newly-knighted Kay is to fight in a great festive tournament, but he’s left his sword at the inn, so he sends Arthur back for it. However, the inn is locked, and Arthur, determined to find a weapon for his foster brother, takes one from an anvil set in a stone in a graveyard.

Arthur, or Wart, if we’re following White (because, as he says, it more or less rhymes with Art, which is short for Arthur) must be the only person in the kingdom who knows nothing about this sword in the stone, which miraculously appeared on Christmas Day. According to White, the sword is ‘stuck through an anvil which stands on a stone. It goes right through the anvil and into the stone. The anvil is stuck to the stone. The stone stands outside a church’.

He pretty much follows Malory, who tells us in Le Morte d’Arthur of a ‘great stone four square, like unto a marble stone; and in midst thereof was like an anvil of steel a foot on high, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters there were written in gold about the sword that said thus:—Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England’.

Arthur, knowing nothing of all this, hands the sword to Kay, who initially lays claim to it, before admitting it is Arthur’s achievement But the noble lords of the realm are not happy and refuse to believe this seemingly base-born lad, a foundling, of unknown parentage, is really the son of dead King Uther. There are contests on Twelfth Day, Candlemas and at Easter when the knights gather to pit their strength against Arthur – but on each occasion he is the only one who can draw forth the sword, so he is finally crowned at Pentecost.

This is from an early 14th century manuscript, produced more than 150 years before
Malory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur. It shows the sword pushed  sideways into the stone.

Grimm Thoughts on Fairy Tales

Further to my mention of fairy stories in yesterday’s post, did anyone else out there listen to Grimm Tales on Radio 4? Writer and mythologist Marina Warner, whose work I always admire, marked the bicentenary of the first publication of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with an exploration of the stories – their origins, how they were gathered together, the way they’ve evolved over the last 200 years, and the various meanings that have been attributed to them. The series was broadcast over the Christmas period, in ten 15-minute slots, each highlighting a different facet of the stories. It’s the kind of thing the BBC does superbly well, and Marina Warner, a very erudite writer, is an excellent presenter.

She began with a resumè of the life and times of German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who collected and studied folk tales. Children's and Household Tales, which contained 86 stories, was published in 1812 and was reprinted and added to in the years that followed until eventually, in 1857, there were 200 tales.  To me, the brothers’ own lives always seem to have a fairy tale quality, and in a later episode Dr Warner looked at their role in the fairy tales, and considers them as avatars of Hansel and Gretel, which is an interesting idea.

My childhood copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales has this illustration
by Pauline Baynes, showing the Prince by Snow White's glass coffin,
and the Seven Dwarfs wondering what will happen.

 For many of us fairy tales are inextricably linked to illustrations. My own favourites are Arthur Rackham, Edmund du Lac and Walter Crane (all discovered long after I first read the Grimms’ work). Dr Warner’s preference, however, is for the spikier, sketchier etchings produced by David Hockney early in his career for a tiny book of six tales, and it was his work she focussed on when discussing the pictures that accompany the stories.

She also spent time exploring the origins of the tales, showing their similarities with stories from other cultures and other times, and gave a fascinating account of Rhodopis, an ancient Egyptian version of Cinderella.  Elsewhere she examined the evidence for historical figures who might have inspired some tales – the story of Bluebeard, for example, may be based on the life of Giles de Rais, a murderous French aristocrat who served in Joan of Arc’s army.

Most chilling was the session explaining how the Nazis treated the Grimms’ work. I hadn’t realised that they took some of the stories, repackaged them to promote their theories of racial purity and national identity, and even produced propaganda films – in one, apparently, the huntsman who rescued Red Riding Hood wore a swastika armband.  According to Dr Warner, this led to the Grimm Brothers and their folk tales being viewed with suspicion in the aftermath of WW2. Personally, I’m not sure I agree with her on that point, as the wonderful, magical stories were very much part of the culture of the 1950s, when I was a child, whether they were read in book form, or related by parents and teachers in their own words.

Wilhelm (left) and Jacob (right) Grimm, painted by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann in 1855.

 However, I think she’s right about the way our view of the tales has altered with changes in society. Today we question the role of women, the way children are treated, and the social system, and there’s a danger that the stories gathered by Jacob and Wilhelm can be dismissed because are no longer regarded as ‘politically correct’. And that leads on to censorship, for Marina Warner also considered the question of  banned books, and whether we are right to produce sanitised versions, by removing anything with a sexual context, and toning down the terrifying violence which appears in some tales.

These stories feature great cruelty: there are murders, abandoned and abused children, wife killers and cannibalism.  And they highlight issues that may be difficult to come to terms with – growing up, death, old age, illness, relationships between parents and children, men and women, sibling and sibling, master (or mistress) and servant. Psychologists could have a field day unearthing the hidden meanings and revealing secret desires, and Dr Warner touched on the theories of Jung and Freud, as well as talking to Susie Orbach, the renowned psychotherapist and psychoanalyst.

Dark and macabre these tales may be, but they are wondrous tellings of a world apart from our own, where talking creatures exist, impossible things happen, and help comes from unlikely places. The juxtaposition of the commonplace and the fantastic is intriguing, and the tales raise questions about the nature of fantasy and reality, falsehood and truth, and their relationship to each other. It’s a wondrous world full of wishes and dreams which can come true, but it’s a dangerous world, and you must be careful what you wish for, for the outcome may be unexpected.

Trying to describe the difference between a lie and a story, Dr Warner told us that basically a lie hides the truth, whilst a good story reveals it. And therein, perhaps, is the secret of the longevity of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for they are about universal truths, and it is that which makes them so timeless, and enables each generation to recreate them in their own way, for their own time and place.

Red Riding Hood, by Walter Crane.

There were so many ideas, and so much information packed into Grimm Thoughts that it would have been nice to have some kind of list referencing sources and the work of experts who took part in the programmes – surely the BBC could post something like this on its website. And there was so much to think about that it would have been nice to return to them, just as one returns to a favourite book. Why can’t radio programmes be made available in some format that would enable you to listen again and again, rather than for only seven days? I know some programmes are available as podcasts but Grimm Thoughts, alas, is not one of them. Or perhaps Marina Warner could publish these essays, for that is what they are, as a book.

But the nice thing about radio is that there are no ‘personalities’ nodding their heads and waving their arms about, no computerised graphics, and no distracting images, so you can just concentrate on the words, and words, after all, are what fairy tales – and all other stories - are all about.

By the way, Helen, over at http://gallimaufry.typepad.com/blog/, has been looking at the individual stories and has some interesting posts on her blog, so do take a look at what she has to say.