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Author
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Comment
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Terri Windling
Registered User
(3/29/06 3:26 pm)
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Death in fairy tales
I'm gearing up to write an article on death in fairy tales. Any thoughts on the subject? Any favorite stories that come to mind? Godfather Death is the most obvious story, but I'd love some help listing other tales that involve death as a character or theme.
I also want to discuss fantasy stories/novels that draw on this kind of imagery, such as Peter Beagle's "Come Lady Death," Rachael Pollack's Godmother Night, and Jane Yolen's "Godmother Death" and Roger Zelazny's "Godson" .... Do any others spring to mind?
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(3/29/06 6:03 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Oh, Terri, this is one of my favorite topics to ponder. I think so many fairy tales and myths concern the fantasy that if you love someone enough, you can bring them back from the dead (that was the thought that informed the poem/story of mine that you published on Endicott a while back), and one of things I was thinking about was that in fairy tales, that effort is usually successful, the wish is fulfilled: Sleeping Beauty wakes up, Snow White recovers, in the modern versions of LRRH, her grandma usually recovers from her illness, the older sisters in Fitcher's Bird are resuscitated, the girl recovers her prince in East of the Sun, West of the Moon, etc. But in myth, the stories tend to be more poignantly about the limits of human love and its inability to defeat death: Gilgamesh can't bring back Enki, Achilles can't bring back Patroclus, Theseus cannot rescue Pirithuous, Orpheus fails, and even though she is a goddess, Demeter's love for Persephone can only bring her pack part-way.
It may be going a bit far afield, but I've always been very moved by Joyce's treatment of death in Ulysses, specifically Stephen's conflicted mourning for his mother and the chapter wherein Bloom attends his friend's funeral. And though it does not, to my knowledge, draw on folklore, Kelly Link's story "Louise's Ghost" is very moving, eerie, and perceptive. Toni Morrison's Beloved draws on the Persephone-Demeter story and, I think, has a lot to say about death and what happens to those who don't die. Lisel Mueller's poem "On Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny" begins with an epigraph about death in fairy tales.
What about Peter Pan and his "lost boys"? Alison Lurie notes that "lost" was and remains a common euphemism for "dead," and of course (I note) the only way to truly not grow up is to die. Can we think of the Neverlands as a kind of afterlife?
That's all off the top of my head!
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 3/29/06 6:06 pm
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(3/29/06 6:54 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
I just thought--what about Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love?
A lot of it may take place after Housman's death, and the play is
absolutely infused with classical myth.
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Random
Registered User
(3/29/06 7:00 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
A couple of other "Death as character" fairytales come
to mind : one is also Grimm, called Death's
Messengers; the other I don't remember so well, but it may be
French, and involves a young man who is transported to a garden
in which time, although he doesn't realise it, passes differently.
He unwittingly spends 300 or so years with the lovely young lady
there, but opts to return to the world when he learns how long he
has been gone. No sooner has he gotten back, however, but he stops
to help an old man who reveals himself to be Death (something along
the lines of, "I've been waiting for your for centuries, but
you won't get away now!"). It's been a while since I read it,
and I can't seem to get anywhere with Google, so I hope someone
else knows what story I mean.
And actually, it just occurred to me that there's also a prominant
role for Death the character in Andersen's The
Nightingale.
For contemporary fantasy, how about Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and their sympathetic takes on the anthropomorphic Death?
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(3/29/06 7:43 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
In addition to Gaiman's portrayal of the character Death in his Sandman and Endless Nights comics, he also explores death as a transitory state for gods in AMERICAN GODS and ANANSI BOYS.
Would you also be interested in ghost stories where being a ghost is a transitory exitence--a way station between life and death when something is still holding the person back among the living? I'm thinking of DEAD ON TOWN LINE by Leslie Connor for example. (A whole article could be written on how death is transitory in the Harry Potter books, where his parents manage to reappear and interact with him in almost every volume.)
Best,
Alice
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(3/29/06 7:49 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Oh, and in Dickens' CHRISTMAS CAROL, the ghost of Christimases yet to come is a version of the grim reaper in a black shroud, presaging Scrooge's dismal end. (And Marley is one of my favorite ghosts.)
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(3/29/06 8:33 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Quote:
he also explores death as a transitory state for gods in AMERICAN GODS and ANANSI BOYS
As does Pratchett in Hogfather, one of his novels most tied into folklore! (Gee, think thos two talk?) The Death character in their collaboration Good Omens is significantly different from the Discworld death, also (though they both speak in caps), and so may be worth a look.
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Richard Parks
Registered User
(3/29/06 9:49 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
If it's not presumptious of me to add, Death also appears as a character in my "Death, the Devil, and the Lady in White," published in Realms of Fantasy last year.
http://dm.net/~richard-parks
Edited by: Richard Parks at: 3/29/06 9:52 pm
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(3/30/06 8:49 am)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
There Celtic legends are worth some study for fairies and death. In Celtic tradition, when someone died it was said they went to be with the fairies.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(3/30/06 10:03 am)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
1st obvious thought when you say Death as a character is Bergman's The Seventh Seal. 2nd thought, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. 3rd thought, those Grolsh ads.
There's a few weird ones in Lang's collection:
"The Voice of Death" - about a country where people don't die but are mysteriously "called away".
"The Prince Who Would Seek Immortality" - which ends up with a bet between Death and the Queen of the City of Immortality over who gets the hero - They throw him up in the air.
"The King Who Would See Paradise" - kind of about death. He gets a glimpse of paradise and discovers the "glimpse" has taken up most of his life, so he's an old man and no longer king. And Death does turn up at the end.
There's also "The Princess and the Chest" - which is sort of about death - about keeping a spooky vigil over a sort-of-dead princess's coffin.
There's probably more.
Apart from that, I like all those stories where good characters who die really live on in a sort of nature/memory coupling, like the trees in Cinderella or the Juniper Tree - and the bird in the JT... etc... That's all I can think.
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DividedSelf
Registered User
(3/30/06 10:07 am)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Also just remembered, there was a sort of fairy story in AS Byatt's Possession ("The Threshold"?) which was spookily about death, I think.
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evil little pixie
Registered User
(3/30/06 11:47 am)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Funny -- just the other day I was thinking about the old legend/folk tale of the rich man who goes into his garden one morning only to find Death staring intently at him. Seriously spooked, he runs inside and tells his servant that he's going to Damascus to escape Death, who's waiting for him in the garden. The man departs, and the servant goes into the garden and asks Death, "Why were you staring at my master?" Death replies, "I was surprised to see him here. You see, I have an appointment with him tonight in Damascus."
There was a poem based on this story, but I can't remember the title or author.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(3/30/06 12:40 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Evil little pixie's story reminded me of the thread a few months back about jewish stories about the angel of death.
Here it is: www.surlalunefairytales.com/boardarchives/2005/jul2005/angeldeath.html
Best,
Alice
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Erica Carlson
Registered User
(3/30/06 3:43 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
I remember being nearly brought to tears by a story by Bruce D. Arthurs called "Death and the Ugly Woman" (published in Sword and Sorceress IV). If I remember correctly, it ends up being strangely comforting.
And Ursula Le Guin takes the theme of death up pretty strongly in her most recent Earthsea novel, The Other Wind.
Edited by: Erica Carlson at: 3/30/06 3:46 pm
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lisajensen
Unregistered User
(3/30/06 9:02 pm)
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Death in fairy tales
To second Writerpatrick re: Celtic concept of death involving fairies: in Ellen Kushner's wonderful "Thomas the Rhymer," the queen of the fairies appears at Thomas' deathbed to help ease him into death, the implication being that he will rejoin her in her fairy bower in the afterlife.
LIsa
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Van45us
Registered User
(3/30/06 9:51 pm)
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Re: Death in fairy tales
Veronica's mention of Lost Boys caught my attention as we've been discussing Peter Pan in another thread. Not only does "lost" sometimes refer to dead, but Neverland is sort of "fairieland," and some legends say that fairies are departed spirits. I've never thought much of the theory, but the spirits of the dead, the "other side" and the fey are mentioned together frequently in many folk tales and myths, and not just in Christian thought.
Also, as I recall, Southern folk and fairy tales seem to have a lot more death in them than many other American stories. May be because of their association with Celtic tales, but Southern black stories of no-doubt African origin contain death in them as well.
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searsmith
Registered User
(3/31/06 8:07 am)
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Death
Now this one's very pop culture, but there's a children's cartoon series call The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (Cartoon Network), in which Grim is the Reaper (voiced with a Jamaican accent) who has been won under Mandy and Billy's control after a gambling game for the soul of a sick hamster (Episode 1). The series title is a play on Grimms' Fairy Tales, although the actual plots only occasionally feature what might be considered fairy tale characters or situations (little blue mushroom fairies, or a witch of the swamp, for instance, who wants to bake a boy pie).
The series's origination story is, of course, a twisted homage to Ingmar Bergman's famous film _The Seventh Seal_ in which a Knight (played by Max Von Sidow) plays chess with Death during the Black Plague. Woody Allen's short play, Death, is also a parody of this famous existentially angst-ridden scenario.
Kelly
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searsmith
Registered User
(3/31/06 8:24 am)
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American Folklore: Devil at the Crossroads
There's also a famous blues legend, that's become a root of American
folklore concerning musicians in particular, that (from the wiki:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson)
"Robert Johnson [said] that he sold his soul to the Devil at
the crossroads of U.S. Highway 61 and U.S. Highway 49 in Clarksdale,
Mississippi in exchange for prowess in playing the guitar. Actually,
the location Johnson made reference to is a short distance away
from that intersection. The legend was told mainly by Son House,
but finds no corroboration in any of Johnson's work, despite titles
like "Me and the Devil Blues" and "Hellhound on My
Trail". With this said, the song "Cross Road Blues"
is both widely and loosely interpreted by many as a descriptive
encounter of Johnson selling his soul. The older Tommy Johnson (no
relation), by contrast, also claimed to have sold his soul to the
Devil. (A similar legend even surrounded virtuoso violinist Niccolò
Paganini a century before.)"
Of course, this Johnson legend is likely referenced in the Charlie
Daniels' band song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" and
in the movie _Crossroads_ (1986, Ralph Macchio). The crossroads
as a place where one's soul would be sold has to do with earlier
understandings of that place as a godless one where one might meeting
unwholesome traffic (and where, historically, Europeans sometimes
buried their suicides and executed criminals). In hoodoo, the crossroads
serves as the ritual place for seeling oneself to the devil, and
such African American magic is no doubt a source for the supposed
Johnson ritual. See Catherine Yronwode's account of the ritual here:
www.luckymojo.com/crossroads.html.
Kelly
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searsmith
Registered User
(3/31/06 8:31 am)
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Death of the Soul
I should add that while the Devil isn't Death, as in death of the body, Death of the Soul is a pronounced motif in fairy tales and might be considered as an adjunct to your discussion. The association between the unsanctified corpse at the crossroads and the death of the soul through sale to the devil there isn't coincidental, of course.
Kelly
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kristiw
Unregistered User
(3/31/06 12:52 pm)
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Death and the Redheaded Woman
Erica's post reminds me of a book I had as a child, "(Mr?) Death and the Redheaded Woman." It was a wonderful story set in the Old West, informally narrated in that style of language. The redheaded woman in question chased Death down on her little pinto pony to bargain with him to spare the life of Billy, her own true love, shot in the stomach in a tavern brawl. He agrees if she'll ride around the world with him and kiss him on the mouth. She also goes to his cabin and meets his mother, who helps her ask him three questions while he sleeps, by the time-tested method of tweaking his hair. I think first she asks him about Billy, then because she has the two questions to spare, she asks him why he took her baby sister from the cradle (because she was sick, so she wouldn't cry anymore) and then what he did when he was lonely-- he looked in the windows at how the mortals slept in each other's arms. At the end of the story she goes back and finds Billy, who of course has been miraculously cured by someone's 'witching' and doesn't give her any credit at all, after all that, for riding her little pinto pony half to death and kissing a strange man on the lips! So she gets on her pony and catches up with Death, and marries him, and takes up the position of Sleep, singing lullabies to children when they're quiet in bed.
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Erica Carlson
Registered User
(3/31/06 1:44 pm)
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Re: Death and the Redheaded Woman
'Cause I'm a librarian:
"Mister Death and the Red-Headed Woman" by Helen Eustis, can be found in an anthology called Westward the Women: an Anthology of Western Stories by Women.
And it really is a great tale - I was lucky enough to hear it told last year by a masterful storyteller who blew her audience away with it.
Edited by: Erica Carlson at: 3/31/06 1:49 pm
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