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'Cry Wolf' by Borja Gonzalez.

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wtf?

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'Norwegian Troll Thinking' by Theodor Kittelsen, (1857 - 1914).

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William Wallace Denslow (1856-1915), ''Denslow's Tom Thumb'', 1903 Source

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Illustration’s by William Wallace Denslow(1856-1915) for his book Denslow’s Mother Goose.He’s probably best known as the illustrator for L.Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” .Denslow is such a fascinating artist to me for his time his drawings look pretty modern the limited colors,minimalist backgrounds, bold choices like just having a shape as a background,and his cartoonish thick outlined designs are pretty graphically ahead in kids book illustration for the early 1900s shame he didn’t illustrate the other Oz books don’t get me wrong I love John R Neil but Denslows art just has a odd charm to it I want to see in the other Oz books.

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From Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows' illustrated by Inga Moore.

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I regularly saw this piece being used to illustrate topics like "fairytale castle". Who could have guessed it comes from Edgar Allan Poe?

The bells and other poems - Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Dulac, ill. - 1912 - via Internet Archive

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Jane Yolen’s impressive HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE wins Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award

The Westchester Library Association announced the 2019 winners of Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award. Both Jane Yolen ‘s HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE and Once There Was a Story were recognized.

This award was established to honor Anne Izard, the noted librarian, storyteller and Children’s Services Consultant in Westchester County (NY) who died in 1990. It is hoped the award will highlight and promote distinguished titles published in the field of storytelling and in doing so, bring the many riches of storytelling itself to a much greater public recognition.

The Annotated African-American Folktales (Henry Louis Gates, Jr. & Maria Tatar)

Beauty and the Beast (Maria Tatar)

Brave Red, Smart Frog (Emily Jenkins)

Crane Girl (Curtis Manley)

Daemon Voices (Philip Pullman)

Dancing on Blades (Csenge Zalka)

HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE (Jane Yolen)

Manjhi Moves a Mountain (Nancy Churnin)

Norse Myths (Kevin Crossley-Holland)

Norse Mythology (Neil Gaiman)

Once There Was a Story (Jane Yolen)

The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet (Carmen Deedy)

Thank You, Omu (Oge Mora)

Congratulations to all the winners

Photo: Jason Stemple

Gary K. Wolfe at LOCUS praised the collection.

Yolen draws on an impressive variety of other folk and fairy tale traditions – Chinese dragon stories (“One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King”), Greek mythology (“Sun/Flight”, a variation on Icarus), Japanese kitsune stories (“The Fox Wife”), Scottish legends (“The Faery Flag”, “Sule Skerry”), Arthuriana (“The Gwynfahr”), Native American tales (“The Woman Who Loved a Bear”), even vampire lore (the surprisingly tender tale of a revenant mom, “Mama Gone”). The poems which accompany the story comments at the end of the book also offer additional perspectives – sometimes a bit sharper and more directly political – on the themes of the stories. If THE EMERALD CIRCUS provided an extensive overview of Yolen’s dia­logue with many of her literary predecessors from Andersen to Baum, HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE serves as a useful and timely companion volume, demonstrating an equally astute and critical dialogue with the world’s folk traditions. While nine of these stories were included in the NESFA retrospective Once Upon a Time (She Said) in 2005, and a half dozen were in Sister Emily’s Lightship and Other Stories way back in 2000, these Tachyon volumes are an invaluable reminder of Yolen’s central role in contemporary fantasy, and perhaps an equally invaluable start­ing point for readers daunted by the sheer volume and variety of her work.

SURLALUNE FAIRY TALES  recommends HOW TO FRACTURE A FAIRY TALE.

This collects many of Yolen’s previously published fairy tale retellings and includes her notes on the tales, too. Some are short stories, others are poems. A very handy collection of Yolen’s short fairy tale works.

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Should we include Lovecraft among fairytale authors?

This question might surprise you, and yet it should be asked.

Today when people speak of Lovecraft's work or Lovecraftian horror, they mostly think of the type of fiction popularized by games like "Arkham Horror" or the Call of Cthulhu RPG. People of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s USA, mostly the East Coast, mostly New-England, fighting eldritch monsters, alien abominations and other multi-eyed blobs while investigating creepy cults, ancient witchraft (well... ancient usually means "Salems' trial) and other star-alignments. Not very fairytale-y.

And yet, Lovecraft wasn't just all this. Lovecraft is usually considered one of the early fantasy authors, and he has an entire set of works not taking place in our world, but rather in fictional cities, otherwordly civilizations, alien planets - and all being... well pure fantasy of gods, sorcerers, strange monsters and fictional wanderers in a world of ghosts, magic and curses. They are still famous to this day, and they are an essential part of his "mythos" and yet people seem to completely forget about them. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath, The Quest of Iranon, The Other Gods, The White Ship, The Doom that Came to Sarnath, The Cats of Ulthar... Much more dark fantasy than what people associate Lovecraft with today.

In this "fantasy" side of his (that fans of the mythos sometimes classify as the "Dreamlands"), we see the HUGE influence of Lord Dunsany, that Lovecraft admired and tried to imitate, but also the influence of... The One Thousand and One Nights. One of the main reasons Lovecraft had such an "Orientalist" obsession was because he was a huge fan of The Arabian Nights, and tried to recreate them in his own work. This Orientalist obsession was also caused in him by Beckford's Vathek, the unique "Oriental Gothic" novel that marked literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, John Keats, they all paid homage to Vathek) - but we fall back on our fairytale topic, because Vathek itself was meant to be a Gothic horror version of the One Thousand and One Nights (and quite fittingly it was published in the 1780s, aka the end of the "fairytale era" in France, the time when literary fairytales only existed in parodies, deconstructions or subversions).

Due to this huge influence, the question should be asked: Should Lovecrfantasy works, his Ulthar, Sarnath, Iranon, Kaddath, be considered part of a fairytale-verse?

Well my answer is no. No, Lovecraft doesn't write fairytale-like things and I never saw fairytale vibes in his work.

But then why am I making a whole damn post? Because of Clark Ashton Smith.

There's a lot of things people ignore or go wrong with when it comes to Lovecraftian fiction or the "Cthulhu mythos". This is because The Cthulhu mythos was built out of many rewrites, derivative works, adaptations and pop-culture vibes. People forget the mythos was originally called "Yog-Sothoth mythos". People forget Cthulhu wasn't the focus of the mythos. People forget water was supposed to be Cthulhu's main bane and enemy, as it was the sea that trapped him and prevented his powers from working - so making him a sort of sea-god is the opposite of what Lovecraft intended. Lot of stuff like that.

But what people forget the most is that the "Cthulhu mythos" we know today wasn't created just by Lovecraft himself - but by the "Lovecraftian circle". Yes, Lovecraft invented it all first, created and oversaw the whole thing - but he encouraged and asked his friends and pen-pals to include in their writings elements and characters of his fictional worlds so as to "expand" the mythos, and in return said friends and pen-pals created their own dark gods and evil sorcerers and cursed tomes that Lovecraft included in his own works, to form a full circle. The Lovecraftian circle.

For example, it might surprise people to learn that Conan the Barbarian is part of the Cthulhu mythos. And yet he is! Robert E. Howard was one of the most prominent members of the Lovecraftian circle, inventing several important parts of the mythos as we know it today - and his most famous heroes, like Conan the Barbarian or Solomon Kane, all had to face a part of the "Lovecraftian mythos" at one point or another. Today we don't associate the prototype of heroic fantasy with "eldritch horror", and yet it was - but Robert E. Howard had a quite different take on the monstrous gods of Lovecraft, who were much more physical and... let's say killable Xp In fact that's one of the things with the Lovecraftian circle: each author had its own take and vibes on the eldritch deities of Lovecraft's pantheons. Sometimes the emphasis was put on them being alien beings and physical monsters, sometimes they were more like the classical gods of Antiquity (just uglier), other times yet they were more abstract ideas and concepts...

And the third important author of the circle, outside of Lovecraft and Howard, was Clark Ashton Smith, who was REALLY much more of a fantasy author than the other two. And he also was VERY much into fairytales - a lot of the same Arabian Nights as Lovecraft (heck, Smith even wrote a sequel to Vathek!), but he also was a big fan of Andersen and madame d'Aulnoy fairytales as a kid. And, if you ask me, you can feel a lot the "dark Arabian Nights" vibe into his Zothique work.

As I am writing these lines, I am reading compiled works of Smith. Smith was very prolific and created several "cycles" covering various alternate periods of Earth. There's the Hyperborean cycle, set on the fictional Hyperborea country of legends, and in the Prehistoric era before the Ice Age - this is where many of the "classics" gods of the Cthulhu mythos comes from, like Atlach-Nacha, Abhoth or Tsathoggua. There's the Poseidonis setting, an island meant to be the last remaining part of Atlantis after its sinking. There's the Averoigne cycle, which I am looking forward to explore because Averoigne is a fictional region of medieval Southern France infested with witches of all sorts. But the compiled volume I am reading currently is his Zothique collection - set in the continent of Zothique. It is supposed to be the last remaining continent of Earth, a new Pangea that reformed itself at the end of the planet's history, and where all the "ancient gods, old demons and primal magics" resurfaced after being forgotten and ignored for many civilizations. And despite being located in a far-far future, Zothique is heavily Arabian Nights inspired - as Smith intended the Zothique continent to be what remained in the future of "Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India" plus North and Eastern Africa.

If you want to check the "horror Arabian Nights" vibe of this setting, just read "The Dark Eidolon" which is very much 1001 Nights-like. (Interestingly The Dark Eidolon was one of the inspirations of Michael Moorcock, famous for setting up the modern dark fantasy with works like The Elric Saga)

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The fairytale world of The Witcher

The Witcher is first and foremost a work of fantasy and as such, of course, when looking at the inspirations of Sapkowski, we have to look at fantasy works. For example the early worldbuilding and characters of The Witcher world bear the heavy mark of D&D (Jaskier is a cliche D&D Bard, the classification of elemental genies is traight out of D&D, there's the handlings of "druids", etc...), while the main character clearly has parallels with Moorcock's Elric (white-haired wanderer-warrior who knows magic and uses elixirs, drugs to maintain his fighting abilities, philosophizes a lot about the ending of an age and the future of humanity and the doom he is condemned to). However, The Witcher is also, primarily, a fairytale work.

[EDIT: So I am used to call Jaskier "Jaskier" but in English he is called Dandelion apparently... So know that when I talk of Jaskier, I'm talking about Dandelion]

And I am not just saying that in the way that almost all major fantasy works are inspired by fairytales, no. It tends to be lost on people due to how they usually know derived incarnations of this series, but The Witcher stories started out as full on fairytale rewrites. More precisely: subversives parodies of fairytales using dark humor, a gritty tone proper to dark fantasy, and fantasy tropes in general mixed with some folklore sprinkled here and there.

Of all the Witcher books, the first two are the ones where this logic is on full display, forming the core of each tale. If you ever missed it, here is a little list of the fairytale references in them. [Note: I am using the French translation so I might miss some stuff or write them strangely for those used to the English translations or the original Polish]

Book 1: The Last Wish

Many people might be surprised to learn that the first story, "The Witcher", is actually the parody of a specific fairytale. It might seem to be just a take on the vampire as it appears in Eastern European folklore, but in truth Sapkowski rewrote a tale that you probably do not know. Why? Because none of the "great" collectors or writers have it: it doesn't appear in Andersen, Grimm, Perrault, Aulnoy, Basile, Straparola, or whoever else you might name. It is however a fully classified fairytale-type that is VERY present and popular in Eastern Europe, hence why it appears in The Witcher: the Aarne-Thompson classified it as type 307, "The Princess in the Shroud/The Princess in the Coffin". The closest thing you'll find to a version of this in the "classical" corpus is a Danish fairytale that Andrew Lang placed in his Pink Fairy Book: The Princess in the Chest (and Paul Delarue centered his own French-specific classification of this type around the story "La Ramée and the Phantom"). In interviews the author explained he took "a Polish fairytale" where "the royal daughter transformed into a monster because of the incest of her parents, as a punishment", but I don't known which story prcisely he used.

The second story, A Grain of Truth, is much more obvious, as it is a farcical take on Beauty and the Beast (with some flavors of Undine in it).

The third story, The Lesser Evil, introduces the Curse of the Black Sun, which is the in-universe existence for the "maidens in the tower" and all these princesses that princes have to rescue from doorless buildings (interwoven with the figure of Lilith). The cases of Fialka and Bernika are obviously inspired by the tale of Rapunzel. However the real character of the story, Renfri, is The Witcher's dark take on Snow-White.

A Question of Price is a large mix. The storyline is actually a retelling of Hans My Hedgehog, but exploring the fairytale trope that in Witcher terms is called "the law of surprise" - the episode of someone in need striking a deal with a supernatural being for help, and unwillingly selling away their children (it is most famously illustrated by Grimm's "The Girl without Hands"). One of the "historical" illustrations of this trope in the Witcher universe is a version of Rumplestiltskin (queen Metinna and Rumplestelt). There's also references to great heroes that served as an example of such "fate-striken children" sold to a mysterious stranger - but if there's a cultural nod there, I didn't get it. Finally several fairytales are referred during the discussions: Baba-Yaga and Cinderella are briefly said to exist while "A Question of Price" takes place. And Pavetta's magic is not related to fairytales, but rather to the strange cultural motif of "puberty-induced or virginity-linked psychic powers" found from poltergeists to Carrie.

The fifth story, The Edge of the World, is the only one of the collection not dealing with fairytales. It is rather a tale mixing on one side rural folklore, farming superstitions, field spirits and harvest gods, with on the other an exploration of the fantasy trope of "disappearing elves".

The sixth story, The Last Wish, is all about wish-granting genies, with a strong influence from the tale "The Fisherman and the Jinni".

Book 2: Sword of Destiny

The first story, The Bounds of Reason, is not deconstructing a fairytale per se, but rather the entire myth of the dragon-slaying. You find references to many elements of said myth: "You must kill the dragon to claim the princess", the saint-knight figure interpreting dragons as pure evil, the band of dwarves famed for slaying a dragon seem to me a nod to The Hobbit. But mainly, we see that the tale begins as a subversion/expansion on the legend of Smok Wawelski, the Dragon of Wawel, known to some as the Dragon of Cracovia. There's also a mention of bridge-trolls (The Three Billy Goats Gruff).

The second story, A Shard of Ice, is not linked to fairytales per se, but uses a motif taken directly from The Snow Queen (and in-universe, the fairytale of the Snow Queen is said to be an embellished version of the Wild Hunt).

The third story, Eternal Flame, has no fairytale theme, it is just a pure fantasy story.

The fourth story, A Little Sacrifice, opens and closes on the in-universe love story that caused the story of The Little Mermaid to exist (turns out it is a ballad by Jaskier, the actual romance went much happier, though not smoother). Also, the under-sea city is explicitely compared to the city of Ys, which is a big legend of France.

With the fifth story, Sword of Destiny, we go back into a lot of fairytale nods (it helps that it is a direct sequel to "A Question of Price"). The "Last Forest" of Brokelion is a nod to Brocéliande, the legendary forest of Arthurian legends. Geralt tells Ciri the fable of the Fox and the Cat. Freixenet turns out to have been the inspiration for the fairytale of "The Wild Swans", which in-universe is a ridiculous exaggeration and mistelling of what truly happened.

The sixth story, "Something More", only is "fairytale-y" as it reuses the saw "surprise-child/law of destiny" elements already prepared and presented by A Question of Price and Sword of Destiny.

Afterward, from what I understood (I haven't read the third book onward), the fairytale elements are dropped to rather put focus on the exploration of the fantasy and folkloric elements - but it is always useful to know that it started out as basically a dark humor /dark fantasy take on fairytales.

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Toxic masculinity in fairytales: Bluebeard

How could I make a series about male fairytale villains and not include Bluebeard, the famous wife-killer?

And, okay, it is not exactly the Bluebeard, but I have to include the Looney Tunes Bluebeard:

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Series 2, Episode 12: In the Name of the Brother - Rumple in Red

Well isn’t this just fantastic. It’s rare to see Rumple in such a vivid colour but they clearly did that on purpose so that he would pop against the black and white. His cravat and waistcoat are beautifully patterned and I love the cut of the coat. This is probably my favourite Rumple outfit so far.

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Series 2, Episode 10: The Cricket Game - Charming in Armour

OUAT has such good armour! That breastplate is fantastic! It seems to be depicting some sort of battle. And then the midnight blue cloak with the fur collar just tops it all off - it all looks very dashing.

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Series 2, Episode 9: Queen of Hearts - Blue Backless Velvet

I love this outfit so much! It’s bloody fantastic. The silhouette is one we’ve seen on Regina before - sleek and body-hugging with exaggerated shoulders. The silver detailing on the sleeves and the neckline is incredible. And just look at that back! It’s just stunning.

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Series 2, Episode 4: The Crocodile - Ruby in Red Shirt

I like this outfit. The long gold necklace over the red shirt is really cute. And I love the little gold tips on her shirt collar. I also love the jaunty hat she puts on when going outside.

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Series 2, Episode 2: We Are Both - Rumplestiltskin

This is a beautifully textured coat. And I love the sassy cravat!

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Series 2, Episode 1: Broken - Aurora’s Cloak

Most of the time, Aurora’s dress is covered by this crinkled cloak with a feathery collar. The cloak is affixed with a silver broach which is just really beautiful.