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Category: On Fairy Stories

Recent Reading: Catherine and Frederick (Grimm’s Fairy Tales)

My daughter and I are still working our way through Grimm’s Fairy Tales at the moment. Grimm’s is an interesting assortment – and I’m not as fond of it as I am of Andersen’s, and certainly not as fond as some of the longer fairy stories produced by the likes of MacDonald – but my daughter enjoys it.

From time to time I’ll find a story worth pondering. But this story – Catherine and Frederick, is simply hilarious. I’m not going to review it. Rather, I’ll simply say this: my daughter laughed so hard she got a case of the hiccups – and that is priceless. If you want a short read that will produce long laughs – this one fits the bill.

Let me also add this: The character Catherine is simply dumb. I mean she’s stupid. She says and does stupid things. She’s the kind who trips over the cordless phone. We all encounter people like this from time to time and there is nothing wrong with having a good laugh at human idiocy. Perhaps we should laugh at our own stupidity more often – maybe so hard that we get the hiccups.

Proverbs 17:22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

Recent Reading: Clever Alice

As always, my daughter and I have been steadily reading fairy tales. I don’t have the time to write on every story we read, especially the short ones, as in Grimm’s, but I found this one interesting enough to do so.

‘Clever’ Alice, as her family calls her, has a prospective husband courting her. But before he marries her he wants certain knowledge that she is of the ‘prudent’ sort. He certainly receives indisputable proof of this.

As her future groom, Hans (you can never go wrong with that name), visits for dinner, Clever Alice heads down to the cellar to fetch some beer. As she drains the beer from the spicket, however, she notices a hatchet that has been left by the builders and is sticking out of the ceiling.

The sight of this hatchet causes Clever Alice a slight nervous breakdown as she fears that in the future said tool might fall from the ceiling and smite her future child as he, like her, stands to fetch beer.

One by one the servants, then the mother and father, come to see what is taking Clever Alice so long, only to be caught up in her weeping for the future. It’s really quite funny – the thought of each of these people joining in mourning for a child that has not even been conceived who might die by a hatchet falling from the sky.

But Clever Alice certainly shows foresight and prudence.

And so Hans marries her, and she remains prudent. She plans ahead, bringing pottage with her to the fields in case she gets hungry. She plans a nap so that she will not be tired. And the end result is…

Well, I won’t give that away, in case you haven’t read it. But let me comment briefly.

The lesson I gained from this tale is simple – prudence, while a good thing, doesn’t guarantee a good result. Thinking, and planning, for the future are beneficial, but they can certainly be overdone. There is a vision of the future that is paralyzing (i.e. seeing the future as mostly full of objects that might injure you or yours).

The future, from a Christian’s perspective, certainly holds doom – or at least Doom’s Day. But some would see the future as only doom. Such believe that every acts is a sign of future catastrophe. Bad laws equal hatchets that may some day fall out of the ceiling. Elections equal hammers that may fall on our heads. A black cat or a broken mirror point to future calamity.

But no matter the possibilities and no matter the signs. No matter the bowls of wrath, or trumpets of judgment, the Apostle John sees, in the end, a new heaven and a new earth wherein righteousness dwell.

Yes the hatchet may fall upon someone’s head. But it has already fallen on the head of the Christ. So then even if it does fall on mine he has already taken the blow for me that I may have life – and a future.

And with this knowledge in hand I must work harder than all (unlike the slothful, yet clever, Alice), for his grace to me is not in vain. Prudence can lead a person to laziness (or at least it does in the story). But a future of grace and renewal leads us to labor on with zeal in hope.

Fear of the future shouldn’t paralyze us, and it doesn’t really make us all that prudent, at least not in the positive sense. Fear of the future should really make us optimistic, if anything, because we know who holds the hatchet in his hand, and who has shed his own blood for us.

Just some thoughts…

Recent Reading: A Tale of One who Traveled to Learn what Shivering Meant

I’ve been reading through Grimm’s Fairy Tales with my daughter. I don’t have the time, or will, to write about everything I read. But I try to make it a point to write about things that stand out to, or affect, me in striking ways. This doesn’t happen too often. Fair-tales are hit and miss to be sure. But the general effect of these stories is cumulative. But, I digress. I’ll follow up on this idea in another post. The subject at hand is a particular tale of ‘one who traveled to learn what shivering meant.’

It’s a short story and you can read it for yourself, so I won’t do more than summarize and note what I took from it.

The story is about a youth who longs to know what the experience of shivering is. He hears folks in the town speaking of an event which made them shiver, and cannot rest until he learns by experience what this means.

His quest in search of the illusive shiver leads him to various places. In each place he repeats his refrain, ‘O that I could shiver’ (and the like), and in each place he meets someone who says they know how to make him shiver. He encounters seven dead men swinging from the gallows, an apparently haunted castle with evil cats and dogs who, apparently, like to bowl using bones for the pins and a skull for the ball. He meets a dead cousin who he thinks he can revive (and eventually does). But none of these things cause him to shiver.

In the end he earns the right to marry a princess and finally learns to shiver as someone simply throws some cold water on him.

Now what could you possibly get from a story like that? I believe it’s making a very profound point (as fairy tales at times do, in their own charming way). As I read the story I found myself to be the lad in some sense. Yes, I have shivered before, but I fear I have forgotten how to.

Our modern world, I think, tries to drive all the shivering out of us. Of course, I don’t mean shivering from the cold, but another kind of shivering. We have forgotten the idea of what Rudolph Otto called ‘the numinous.’ C.S. Lewis spoke often of this idea. He summarized fear of the numinous like this (I’m paraphrasing). If you were to be told that a tiger was in the hall outside your door you would be afraid, and justifiably so, for it could kill you. That’s one type of fear – natural fear, or animal fear, we might call it. But if you were told there is a ghost in the hall, that would evoke a different sort of fear, after all, who’s ever been killed by a ghost? That is fear of the numinous. It’s this sense in which I, and I think many others, have forgotten how to shiver.

The idea that the youth of the story would not shiver at the sight of seven men, dead, hanging by seven nooses should be ridiculous. But it’s not. We see that sort of thing on movie, television, and computer screens daily – and we don’t shiver.

The sight of a dead human body, soulless, in a casket should make us shiver. Just the thought that someone living, vital, thinking, loving, moving about, etc, suddenly being rendered into a state of death and decomposition should stun us. But it doesn’t. We’ve taken the vaccination, we’ve built up a tolerance, we’ve forgotten how to shiver.

In the story, the boy sees his cousin raised from the dead, and yet doesn’t shiver. Imagine that the resurrection of the dead would fail to evoke such a reaction. It should send chills down the spine, but it doesn’t. When’s the last time you read the end of the one of the four gospels and shivered in awe of the miracle that took place when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead? We’re numb, face it. If that doesn’t move us, what will?

But I suppose Abraham (in Jesus’ story) had a point:

He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead'” (Luke 16:3).

Nothing could make the boy shiver but cold water. We’re not much different. And so we shiver like the animals – when we’re cold, when we’re sexually stimulated, when we drink ice water, or a slush, or something of the like, too fast and get brain-freeze, etc, etc. But, just in the sense of this story, we’ve forgotten how to shiver over the numinous, the unexplainable, the miracle, and the like.

In biblical terms, the very idea of sin should make us shiver, but we don’t. Seeing a husband commit adultery and ruin his family should make us shiver, but it doesn’t. Seeing a shoplifter caught at the grocery story should make us shiver, but it doesn’t. Seeing a man shot dead on the street corner (as I did a few weeks ago) should make us shiver, but it doesn’t (at least it didn’t me). The very pride and lust in our hearts that rises up suddenly, unasked for, and without seeming provocation should make us shiver, but it doesn’t. It’s too commonplace, we’ve been there and done that and bought the phone app (you can’t say t-shirt anymore, right?).

Very early in my reading of the story my mind drifted to words I remembered from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah:

Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown,” says the LORD (Jer. 6:15).

The people of Israel had come to a point where their sin no longer made them blush. They were numb to it. It was ordinary. They had forgotten how to blush, and so have we. I bet they didn’t shiver either.

I will be giving my thoughts on Chesterton’s Orthodoxy soon. He was right – sometimes fairy tales are the best means of conveying truth because we need to see something take place in another world before we realize that it is taking place in ours (more on this to come). Give this fairy tale a read and some thought (if you like fairy tales, but hey, you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t!).

Recent Reading: The Giant’s Heart, by George MacDonald

I read this story out loud with my daughter. I was ready to pronounce that I had found no ‘moral’ in this story, until I sat down to write my thoughts on it, and now it has become clear.

I do not read stories looking for a moral. I think to read in this way can cause the experience of reading itself to suffer. But, nevertheless, there must be themes that emerge. And the better the writing, the more vibrant the story, the more the themes will be illumined to the reader.

This is the story of two small children who enter into Fairy Land. They find themselves in the house of a Giant whose great delight is to eat pudgy kids. They discover that the Giant keeps his heart outside of his body for the purposes of security and that, at this particular time, it is being kept in the nest of an eagle.The children resolve to capture his heart so that they might gain control over him in order to urge him to live a better life by, especially, not eating children. I won’t give away too much, but I will reflect for a moment on the lasting impression left upon me by the story.

This story, if you can say such a thing about fiction, literally depicts the ‘guarding’ of one’s heart. This calls to mind, of course, the well-known proverb (Proverbs 4:23):

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

The Giant keeps his heart safe by never letting it remain in the same place. He will not keep it in his body. He will not keep it in his house. He will not let his wife keep it. He must find various places throughout the Land that will serve for its protection. In the end I think he learns the lesson that putting your heart in a hard to reach place, or letting it be detached from you, or hiding it, will not always serve for the good. Perhaps there was another way he could have guarded it – perhaps a better way.

Perhaps there is a better way that you and I can guard ours as well. The only sure safe place for the heart is in Jesus Christ. By believing in him we are united to him by faith so that he objectively becomes our representative. Our hearts our hid in the ‘cleft of the rock’ so that God’s wrath, and the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil cannot pinch our hearts and cause us anguish (you have to read the story for that last part to make sense). We can guard our hearts by lifting them up, and offering them, to Christ. There is no other way – just ask MacDonald’s Giant. The Giant knew that the ‘wellsprings of life’ flowed from the heart, but he guarded it in the wrong place and in the wrong way.

Cheers to old MacDonald for making Scripture come alive to me again (whether he meant to or not, but I bet he did).

Recent Reading: The Light Princess, by George MacDonald

This is another book I read out loud with my daughter. This is the fourth story I have read of MacDonald’s (I am also in the process of reading Phantastees) and I have truly enjoyed his work. I will not focus on the plot here in any detail (I’ll leave the reviewing for others) but only focus on the points that stood out in my reading so that I can record them for future reference.

This story may be one of the most prototypical fairy tales ever (at least among those I have read). You have a Princess and a Prince, a King and Queen, and a wicked witch (who happens to be the king’s sister). On top of that you have the classic catastrophe/eucatastrophe (Tolkien’s word). In other words, you get the classic twist of fate, or sudden turning of events, that leads to a happy ending.

My daughter and I began this story not having the slightest idea what it was about. It was interesting to observe her reaction to it as we began to read. She made the choice to read this book because of the title. She told me, as she was rather disappointed, that she assumed it was about a princess who could make light.

She wasn’t disappointed for long, however, because the story gripped her. It gripped me as well I must confess.The classic love story of the nameless Prince and Princess (why should a prince and princess need names anyway?), which appears to be headed toward tragedy, is enough to keep anyone’s attention.

Moving past the preliminaries, let me focus on two themes. I say two themes, though they are essentially one. For the one is a part of the other. But it is helpful, at least to me, to record them separately.

1. Puns in General (the importance and force of puns)
We are told early on in the story that the king is not a fan of puns. But most of the story revolves around one great pun – the idea of ‘light.’ The Princess is the ‘Light Princess,’ meaning that she has no weight. She has been cursed to live a weightless existence, floating to and fro in the breeze except when she is tied down or kept inside. MacDonald uses this idea of weightlessness as a pun (though not a humorous one, rather as a serious word with a double meaning) for the character and disposition of the Princess, for she is not only ‘light’ in terms of the force of gravity on her, but in all other areas as well. For instance, she is lighthearted, in the worst sense of the term. She cares for nothing – not her parents, not the prince, not those who suffer, etc.

I find this great pun very interesting. I think I had forgotten the power of the pun (In our day I believe a pun must be humorous to be considered a pun-proper. So perhaps we wouldn’t call this a pun at all. However I think pun is as good a word as we might apply to it, so let us continue). There is a power to a craftily-handed word. I think of Jesus’ encounter with Nathanael in the early chapters of John’s gospel:

  • John 1:47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!”

It’s not obvious to all readers, but Jesus is using a clear play-on-words here. Nathanael is an Israelite, meaning he is a descendent of Jacob. Jacob’s name means in one sense, ‘to deceive.’ Therefore Jesus is cleverly saying to Nathanael, ‘Look at this, a Jacob who is no Jacob,’ or ‘A descendant of the deceiver who is not a deceiver himself.’ It’s a pun of sorts, and its effective (read it for yourself if you don’t believe me).

I point this out only to say that these sorts of word-plays can be a very effective and thought-provoking way of driving home a point (i.e. note to self: puns should be in your repertoire, start using them, but only if they’re good).

2. The Pun in Particular (observations about the specific pun of this story)
The ‘lightness’ of the Princess is not only a physical quality, but is an all around description of her. The materialist philosopher, along with his spiritual counterpart, just don’t get it. The problem is not something to do with her bones and nerves. Neither is it related to a spiritual mishap (though she was cursed by a witch as the initial cause). Rather the problem is that she has no true humanity. The idea is that humans care – they love, they hate, they sympathize, they hurt – but she doesn’t. She therefore has no glory. I say glory because the Hebrew idea of glory, which I’m sure MacDonald was familiar with, implies weightiness. Glory is the inner stuff of a person, the thing that gives them a weight, a true existence, etc.

The question then becomes, How can the princess gain weight? That is, how can she physically become heavy, how can she, as MacDonald puts it, ‘get her gravity?’ The philosophers have their answers, but they don’t truly understand. The clue to the true answer is in the Princess’ relationship with/to water.

Any time she enters into water, she gains her gravity and becomes as a normal human being. Perhaps then, they speculate, if we could only make her cry, the water would normalize her. But remember, she has no feelings, nothing can make her cry.

That is, until she sees the loving, selfless sacrifice of the Prince, who gives his own life to save hers. This sacrifice moves her, and causes the tears to flow. And from then on she gains her gravity. So then, the sacrifice of the Prince not only saves her physically, but it saves her in a much deeper sense, as it moves her in such a way as to give her weight through her own tears. In other words, his sacrifice not only keeps her alive, but actually makes her alive for the first time as a true human in all the glory that humanity entails.

The allusion to the gospel of Jesus Christ is clear enough. His death not only objectively saves us from death (Eph. 2:1 death) and gives us life (eternal), but helps us to come to grips with who we really are – our own shortcomings, sin, etc – and allows us for the first time to embrace life, and live the existence that we were meant to live in its fullness. His sacrifice saves us and moves us, it delivers us and propels us, it rescues us and renews us.

The Light Princess is a great story because of its echoes of the Great Story. O, the power of this pun.

Recent Reading: The Marvellous Land of the Snergs, by E.A. Wyke-Smith

I read this book out loud with my daughter and could not have been more pleased. This is one of those worthy children’s books that any child (boy or girl, 5 year old or 10 year old or 31 year old like me, etc) could, and probably would, enjoy. May daughter and I certainly enjoyed it.

It has all the elements of adventure and humor that you find in other such fairy-stories, but the fact that two of the primary characters, Joe and Sylvia, are normal humans makes for an interesting blending of normalcy with the magic of the land of faerie.

As far as takeaways, I want to list a few of my favorite quotes for future reference and briefly remark on a prominent theme of the book.

1. Favorite quotes:
Interestingly, my favorite lines in this book are all humorous. This book was by no means a ‘comedy,’ but the humor stands out:

  • Of the Snergs’ love for feasts:

They are great on feasts, which they have in the open air at long tables …This is necessary because nearly everybody is invited – that is to say, commanded to come, because the King gives the feasts…They are sometimes hard up for a reason for a feast, and then the Master of the Household, whose job it is, to hunt for a reason, such as its being somebody’s birthday. Once they had a feast because it was nobody’s birthday that day (p. 10).

  • Of the Dutch Sailor, Vanderdecken’s parrot:

Vanderdecken’s parrot was still going strong, for the curse had come on him too…and he sat on a perch outside in the sun with a tin pot full of nuts beside him, swearing in High Dutch (p. 16).

  • The King’s sarcasm toward Gorbo the Snerg (who is considered the village idiot):

Hail, Gorbo, cleverest and brightest of the Snergs we don’t think…And what doest thou here with these young ones, O Ornament to the race the other way around?….Yes and in what part of the wide address didst thou find them, thou first-class brain perhaps not? (p. 42).

  • This isn’t a quote, but the idea of Golithos being a ‘reformed’ Ogre has given us quite a bit of fodder in our house.
  • Again, not a quote, but the comedic antics of Baldry (the jester), i.e. hitting folks with his stick, buttering the steps, and especially his dramatic faking of his own death to win the king’s favor, is quite humorous.
  • Of Gorbo bribing the witch’s cat to lead them to her by feeding him fish (this may be my favorite line in the whole book):

‘Did ums old cats want um sprats?’ he said soothingly. ‘Then um good old cats must work for um sprats’ (p. 205).

2. Theme
The idea that primarily stands out in the story (though I’m not sure that most children would see it) is that of an anti-moral-story. This does not mean that there is no morality, nor that bad morality is at the heart of the story. Rather, the author continually alludes to the fact that children are meant to learn a moral from the story. He reminds us that Joe and Sylvia have been very bad in running away from their home in Watkyns Bay, and that their actions have led to, for lack of a better term, a big mess. Yet in the end, Sylvia and Joe are heroes, along with Gorbo, who has been painted as an idiot throughout the book.

In other words, the troublemakers and the idiot actually accomplish a lot of good (bridging gaps between several cultures – helping them to join together in one cause, forming great friendships in the various kingdoms, and slaying two wicked villains in the process). The moral in the end therefore is not what you expected. Bad works out for good, which makes it much harder to condemn the bad. In the end, the children were just adventurous, and perhaps we all need a bit more of this quality.