The Journal of Mythic Arts: Articles

Snow, Glass, Apples: The Story of Snow White by Terri Windling

To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, "Some day my prince will come." (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children's tender ears. More>>>

Death and Return in the Myth of Persephone by Kathie Carlson

The most complete and well–known source of the myth of Demeter and Persephone available to us comes from the first Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed around 650 B.C.E. While preserving and elaborating the most coherent form of the myth, the author of the Homeric Hymn screened out many of its more archaic and most interesting elements. These are to be found in variants of the myth, which survive only in fragmentary form. In the following rendering of the mythic tale, I have used the Homeric Hymn as a baseline (drawing from the translations of Charles Boer1 and Paul Friedrich2 in particular); the relevant variants appear in my commentary on each part of the Homeric story.

Saluting Demeter as the 'awesome' goddess and describing her daughter as the Kore whom Zeus "gave away to be seized by violence" by Hades, the Homeric author begins his tale: Kore was playing in a field one day, far from her mother, picking flowers with other maiden goddesses. Suddenly she came upon a flower never seen before—the narcissus— which Earth (the goddess Gaia) had grown as a favor to Hades and Zeus. The young woman was amazed and reached for the hundred–headed blossom in delight but as she did, the earth opened wide and up from its chasm leapt the Lord of the Underworld. He snatched the girl and carried her off in his chariot. More>>>

Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber by Terri Windling

Though based on older folk tales of demon lovers and devilish bridegrooms, the story of Bluebeard, as we know it today, is the creation of French writer Charles Perrault — first published in 1697 in his collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of Past Times). Perrault was one in a group of writers who socialized in the literary salons of Paris, collectively creating a vogue for literature inspired by peasant folk tales. These new stories were called contes des feés, from which our modern term "fairy tales" derives — but the contes des feés of the French salons were intended for adult readers.

Bluebeard," for example, has little to recommend it as a children's story. Rather, it's a gruesome cautionary tale about the dangers of marriage (on the one hand) and the perils of greed and curiosity (on the other) — more akin, in our modern culture, to horror films than to Disney cartoons. The story as Perrault tells it is this... >More>>>

Dusk, Dawn, and Days of the Dead: Doorways into Other Worlds by Terri Windling

Between the setting of the sun and the black of night, dusk is a potent, magical time . . . for in its eerie half-light (according to folklore found around the globe) one can cross the borders dividing our mundane world from supernatural realms. Like many children, I longed to discover a doorway into Faerieland or a wardrobe leading to Narnia. I recall a summer night's solitary vigil in an old graveyard: a small girl huddled in the shadows, escaping the chaos of a troubled home, trying to conjure a portal to a magic realm by sheer force of will. Like many children hungry for a deeper connection with the spirit-filled unknown, what I failed to find that moonlit night I discovered in the pages of fantasy books, and later through studies and travels in enchanted landscapes of legend and myth.

     When my child-self sat among the graves, I was in the right place at the wrong time. Autumn, not summer, is the season in most folk tales when doors between worlds open... More>>>

A Million Little Mermaids by Virgina Borges

I am a member of The Little Mermaid generation of girls. When the Disney movie premiered in 1989, I was smitten; it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. I loved Ariel, the spunky red–headed heroine, and Sebastian, her singing–crab sidekick. When I went home, I made myself a mermaid's tail from a sheet of butcher paper spangled with sequins and glitter. I was five years old.

It wasn't until many months later that I learned the full story of The Little Mermaid. We had a tattered picture–book copy of the original translation of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 tale. For some reason, my mother always insisted on reading it aloud to me, rather than encouraging me to read it out loud to her, as she so often would do with other stories. When she read the book to me, it always ended happily: the mermaid gives up her voice to follow her true love, and is rewarded for her persistence with marriage. My mother told me a fairy tale of a fairy tale. (Read more.)

Spells of Enchantment: The Fairy Tale Cycle by Helen Pilinovsky

Once upon a time. . .these words are an incantation, signaling the beginning of a spell of enchantment — a magical spell, or a spell in the sense of a timeless period, or often some combination of the two. They describe a then that could have occurred at any time, in any place, a then which hovers in a delicious void of possibility. However, the thing that we — the modern readers, lovers, enchanted connoisseurs of fairy tales — can sometimes forget is that the prospects of the then can be equally relevant in the now. Fairy tales, folk tales, legends, and myths — fantastic stories of all kinds — are as relevant to the modern world as they ever were. The inspirations for the magical aspects of these stories are as present in our surroundings as they were in any others, requiring only the impetus of the human imagination to be brought to life, and applied to the lives of the denizens of our modern cities. Perhaps more importantly, the underlying reasons that had prompted people to create these tales — explorations of human motivation — are still present within us. (Read more.)

Mythic Fiction for Young Adults by Julie Bartel

...The simplest and best definition of mythic fiction is fiction that draws essential substance from myth, folklore, fairy tale, and legend. The conscious use of mythic themes and tropes — that is elements and language that reflect either figurative or literal use of images, symbols, and metaphors from myth and folklore —is the key ingredient, allowing authors to explore realistic themes on a symbolic level. As in much of the best fantastic literature, the strength of mythic fiction lies in the metaphorical foundations of the story, and in the writer's use of timeless motifs to comment on or illuminate contemporary life.... More>>>

Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Heart of Darkness by Colleen Mondor

I have read a lot of young adult fiction while crafting my monthly column for Bookslut but Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness completely surprised me. Mildly disturbing from the beginning, the story follows a teenaged Sym who ends up on a surprise trip to Antarctica with her polar obsessed Uncle Victor. The flaky uncle would raise red flags for anyone right away but it is Sym's self professed love for doomed Antarctic explorer Lawrence "Titus" Oates on page one that will give many readers pause. Plucky teenagers are practically required in YA novels but crushes on dead legendary explorers? That doesn't happen — ever. So even though the book travels into the territory of thriller classic it is the inclusion of Oates that elevates The White Darkness to a whole new level. McCaughrean isn't afraid to make her heroine a geek — a polar geek even — and for that I am mightily impressed. (Read more.)

Pamela Dean's The Secret Country and Authorial Creation by Eve Sweetser

   

When I first read Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy, I was struck by her creativity in using familiar themes in radically unfamiliar ways. I was amused and interested as her protagonists gradually figured out the complex relationship between their world and the Secret Country, a world they thought they had "made up" in a game (the actual Secret Country is also sometimes ritually called the Hidden Land). But then — after many a plot twist! — Dean came round and hit me a double whammy at the end, arranging for half of her protagonist families' members to emigrate permanently to the Secret Country, while the other half stay behind in our world. Ruth, Ted, and Laura Carroll, with Ted and Laura's parents, choose the Secret Country; Patrick and Ellen Carroll (along with the parents of Ruth, Patrick and Ellen) stay here. And everyone copes with this decision. There's a major surface anomaly here....  More>>>

Lost and Foud: The Orphaned Hero by Terri Windling

We find them everywhere in fantasy fiction: the "orphaned heroes," young men and women whose parents are dead, absent, or unknown, who turn out to be the heirs to the kingdom, the destined pullers of swords from stones, the keys to the riddles, the prophesies' answers, the bearers of powerful magic. Think of J.R.R. Tolkien's Frodo Baggins, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Philip Pullman's Lyra Belacqua, Garth Nix's Lirael, and Jane Yolen's White Jenna. Think of the orphaned protagonists at the heart of Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci books, Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn Chronicles, Lian Hearn's Tales of the Otori, and countless others. (Read more.)

The Dark of the Woods by Terri Windling

   

"In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood," writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward... More>>>

Storytelling & Healing by Heinz Insu Fenkl

    

...Telling a story causes you to become its audience, and when you listen to yourself, you learn something about yourself that you did not know before. (By "telling" and "listening," I also mean writing and reading.) To this basic truth about storytelling and writing, I would add another truth, this one gleaned from my childhood exposure to Shamanism: Serious storytelling not only has the potential to heal, it can and does heal. This is no surprise to those who practice psychoanalysis (either Jungian or Freudian), in which it is understood that storytelling is a way for the unconscious to hide meaning from the conscious (Freud), or for the subconscious to send a message to the conscious (Jung). But what I did not realize, perhaps because I had been academically preoccupied all these years, was that this sort of therapeutic storytelling happens all the time, not only in the context of therapy or meaningful conversation, not only in the language of dreams and disguised autobiographical writing, but in the way we go about living our everyday lives.... More>>>

Healing the Wounded Wild by Kim Antieau

I  think in stories. I may even feel in stories. I have done so as long as I can remember. When I became chronically ill, I looked for answers in stories. I wrote them, and I read them. The story I came back to again and again was the fairy tale "Silver Hands." For a long time I didn't understand why. Now, at least for me, "Silver Hands" seems like a primer on how to heal. A fairy tale is a gem, whole in and of itself; it can shatter if we pick at it too much, so I will try to handle this tale with care to keep it from flying to pieces as I talk about it in relation to healing.... More>>>

The Monkey Girl by Midori Snyder

When I was a girl reading fairy tales, I appreciated those courageous maidens tromping off in iron shoes or flying on the back of the west wind to find their future husbands where they, imprisoned by trolls or cannibal mothers, waited to be rescued. I admired those young women and their single–minded purpose. They were bold, resourceful, and spirited. And they were certainly a far cry from the “waiting–to–be–awakened” girls or the girls expecting to be fitted with a shoe, a Prince, and a future all at the same time.

Yet even in their plucky natures and heroic tales, there was still something about them that troubled me. Perhaps it was the assumption of happily–ever–after, or at least the seeming surrender of all that reckless adventure. Their rites of passage completed, the journey to find a husband over, there was an expectation that life for these young women would settle once again into neatly defined roles and an untroubled routine. This assumption didn't sit well with me at all.... More>>>

Donkeyskin, Deerskin, Allerleirauh: The Reality of a Fairy Tale by Helen Pilinovsky

    

Fairy tales are stories which are based upon those issues which affect everyday life — hate and love, poverty and wealth, ugliness and beauty, hardship and happiness — disguised by a thin veneer of metaphor and magic which removes them from the immediate world, making them universal in tone, as applicable today as it was when the phrase "fairy tale" was first coined in the literary salons of 17th–century France....Thanks to the changes in the old tales made first by Victorian editors, and then by modern film–makers, "fairy tale endings" are now associated with unrealistic, inhuman flawlessness and situations in which everything, however improbably, goes right — a condition which can only be attained completely through magic, as reality is somewhat less obliging. That quality of perfection, however, is not representative of the fairy tale genre as a whole, for the unbowdlerized tales possess examples of behavior, which, when read literally, are but all too real: abandonment, incest, abuse.    More>>>

Brother & Sister: A Matter of Seeing by Ellen Steiber

          

"Little brother took his little sister by the hand and said: "Since our mother died we have had no happiness; our step–mother beats us every day, and if we come near her she kicks us away . . . Our meals are the hard crusts of bread that are left over . . . Come, we will go forth together into the wide world."

So begins the Grimms' tale "Brother and Sister," on which I very loosely based "In the Night Country," a story written for the anthology The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors. As its title indicates, the anthology collected stories and poems that were based on traditional fairy tales and dealt with surviving the traumas of childhood. We borrowed the imagery of the old tales as a way of confronting old pain; and as an act of transformation, hoping that the magic of the fairy tales would find its way into our stories and heal those wounds. Appropriately, many of the pieces in the anthology deal with physical and sexual abuse and their aftermath. Because that was not what I came out of, I decided to write what I knew about: the breaking of the spirit, being shut down, being so locked in fear that you no longer knew who you were. Therapy had taught me that there was no magic formula to heal any of this, but intuitively I was led to a fairy tale that had quite a lot to say on the subject....  More>>>

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair by Terri Windling

Maiden-in-a-Tower stories can be found in folk traditions around the world — but "Rapunzel," the best known of these stories, comes from literary sources. The version of "Rapunzel" we know today was published as a German folk tale by the Brothers Grimm in 1857 — but it's now believed that their "Rapunzel" was neither German nor a proper folk tale.... More>>>

Ted Hughes and Crow by Ann Skea

"Mythic poets," Hughes wrote in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, ". . .seem to be a distinct biological type." In their work, beneath the "surface glitter of the plot," there lies a deep "mythic plane" where, as for the Occult Neoplatonists of Shakespeare's time, "all archaic mythological figures and events are available as a thesaurus of glyphs or token symbols." For such poets, myth is part of the essence of their poetry rather than something on which they draw from time–to–time. Hughes, himself, was just such a mythic poet.... More>>>

The Secret Alchemy of Dr. Seuss by Heinz Insu Fenkl

...I have yet to meet a literate English speaker who doesn’t have some clear memory of a Dr. Seuss book. In fact, most of those who recall their initial engagement with Seuss will describe it as an especially memorable or even formative reading experience. In the same way that Charles Dickens has become an integral part of English language culture through our use of the name "Scrooge" from A Christmas Carol, Seuss has entered the cultural dictionary with "Grinch." These days (particularly after the film adaptation), one is actually more likely to be criticized for being a Grinch than for being a Scrooge.

Among Seuss’s forty-four books, many of them radical in their time, the one that has received the most attention in recent years is The Lorax, which was the center of some unexpected controversy in the American Northwest...  More>>>

The Symbolism of Rabbts & Hares by Terri Windling

       

A medieval church stands at the center of my small village in England’s West Country, and in that church is a strange little carving that has come to be known as the symbol of our town: three hares in a circle, their interlinked ears forming a perfect triangle. Known locally as the Tinner Rabbits, the design was widely believed to be based on an old alchemical symbol for tin, representing the historic importance of tin mining on Dartmoor nearby. Recently, however, a group of local artists and historians created the Three Hares Project to investigate the symbol’s history. To their surprise, they discovered that the design’s famous tin association is actually a dubious one, deriving from a misunderstanding of an alchemical illustration published in the early 17th century. In fact, the symbol is much older and farther ranging than early folklorists suspected. It is, the Three Hares Project reports, "an extraordinary and ancient archetype, stretching across diverse religions and cultures, many centuries and many thousands of miles. It is part of the shared medieval heritage of Europe and Asia (Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism) yet still inspires creative work among contemporary artists...."  More>>>

The Owlglass & the Moon of Gold: Till Eulenspiegel & Kim Seon-dal by Heinz Insu Fenkl

      

Every culture has its trickster tales of both the animal and human variety. It's unfortunate that contemporary American children miss much of the performative storytelling tradition of the past, but even urbanites see figures like Bugs Bunny, whose anthropomorphism serves as a convenient interweaving of the two categories of animal and human. The traditional rabbit–as–trickster (which those urbanites would see in the Disney rendition of Br'er Rabbit) combines with a sort of campy Groucho Marx figure in Bugs Bunny, providing stories that endure repeated engagement over the years. My 10–year–old nephew has just begun to notice some of the layered humor in the Warner Brothers cartoons, and he already refers back to his 7–year–old self as naive. Now he asks if Bugs is gay.)

I spent most of my childhood years in Korea, hearing a great deal of the oral tradition from my storyteller uncles, so by the time I was exposed to figures like Bugs Bunny, I associated them with already familiar characters. Bugs was like the clever rabbit who tricked the Dragon King (who wanted to eat the poor rabbit's liver), or the kind rabbit who helped the hapless man put the hungry tiger back into the pit....More>>>

Tricksters by Terri Windling

It is winter now as I sit in the Sonoran desert of Arizona, contemplating Coyote and his sack full of Trickster tales. In a number of Native American cultures, it is considered inappropriate, even dangerous, to tell Coyote tales at any other time of year; it is disrespectful to Coyote and unlucky to attract his attention by telling his stories out of season. Wild coyotes, cousin to the Trickster of legend, often appear in the dry stream bed just beyond my office window. They are beautiful creatures, untamable, sensibly wary of humankind. It is not at all unusual to see coyotes here in the desert outskirts of Tucson, but there seem to be more and more of them lately — drawn here by my interest in their stories, the traditionalists would say. It is one thing to read Coyote tales as I first did years ago in New York City, far from the creature's natural haunts; quite another thing to read them here, where coyotes roam the yard at night, making an eerie noise that sounds remarkably like laughter.... More>>>