Monthly Archives: December 2009

Frog Princesses and Water Nixies

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Water Nixe

Water Nixe

What is it about frogs in fairy tales? They are green and slimy, with big staring eyes and wide gaping mouths, and they make burping noises in the night.  Kissing one is hardly appealing, making them a favorite curse of evil fairies and witches, who know that a kiss can hold a power beyond any other kind of magic, if it conveys love.

Numerous stories tell of princes and princesses turned into water creatures, and of fish who are magical helpers when they are treated kindly. Usually a magical kiss, and the acknowledgment of love will break the spell–short of throwing the frog against the wall.

However, once a reader gets past the fairy tales that have been cleaned up to be moral tales for children, one finds a tremendous body of material on various kinds of water beings. One of these is the water nixie–a.k.a.  knucker, neck, sprite, sylph, siren, Lorelei, mermaid, melusine, or water-man, depending on the language and the culture where the stories originate. Like the magical fairyland,  people envisioned an under water kingdom separate from but parallel to the dry land world, such as the realm of Poseidon, king of the seas or the underground realm of the dwarves and earth sprites.

But it isn’t easy being green. Ask any Jenny Greenteeth–one name of such water creatures. This one appears in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men as the heroine’s first adversary, and she is fairly easily conquered with an iron frying pan.

The majority of such stories are cautionary tales, warning people (probably children and non-swimmers)  away from water, as the water beings would lure the unsuspecting human into the water to drown, mostly with malice, but sometimes with only the desire for company.  Water-people are often shape-shifters, both changing from fish or snakes to humans, but sometimes to other things as well, such as treasure.  Insome cases the water-folk have no specific shape at all, but like Odo in Deep Space Nine, are basically liquid.

A well-known version is the Greek sirens, who use their beautiful voices lure sailors with to wreck their ships on the rocks of the island. Another version is the Rhine maidens or the Lorelei, who live in the Rhine. The Ring Cycle of Wagner is based on the Theft of the Rhinegold which is cursed and brings the destruction of all who own it until it is all returned to the Rhine–much like the gold of the Aztecs in Pirates of the Caribbean.

One tale explains the red water lilies in a German lake as being stained by the blood of a girl who committed suicide rather than keep her father’s bargain to be the bride of the water-man who provided the fish that the family ate.

Several stories, such as that of Melusine,  reflect the selkie legends,  without the theft of the sealskin,  where the water-woman falls in love with a human and provides wealth and sometimes even a magical castle, with the proviso that he allow her a day of complete privacy once a week, and that he never watches as she births their children. Of course, the husband eventually must satisfy his curiosity, and learns that she is a mermaid who must get back into the water and her natural form. In one case, the ghost of the nixie still haunts the castle and can be seen every seven years, either as a woman or as a snake with a gold key in her mouth. Retrieving the key both sets her free and brings her power to the rescuer if she is his bride.

"Stromkarlen" by Ernst Josephson 1884

"Stromkarlen" by Ernst Josephson 1884

People lured by the water-folk don’t always drown. The nixie can be convinced or tricked into giving up the person stolen by offering her items of gold–comb, spinning wheel, mirror.  Other times, the person can get away from the nixie by throwing similar items behind them as they run away, which causes the items to become forests, mountains and other obstacles.

In other stories, the nixie, or sometimes a troll, is scared away from a village inn or grain mill when  he comes to cook a meal (uninvited) at the solstice or new year. Everyone is afraid of the nixie except a man and his performing bear, who are too tired to travel on.  The nixie teases the bear, which attacks the nixie and drives it away.  Later on, the nixie asks the owner of the mill or inn if he still has the “big cat” and never bothers the village again. Yet, the nixie and the man are on speaking terms and apparently see each other occasionally.

In a few stories, the nixie can be coaxed to teach the human to play music with the proper enticement–blood, a black animal, or vodka. The music may be to lure people, but it may also just be part of the lifestyle of the nixie, which can be presented as having more fun than the humans do–much like fairies in general where the party goes on forever and the road never ends.

Other legends, which don’t quite have all the pieces of a complete story, speak of the water-people who come to market bringing their flour and butter for sale just as the human people do, but who can be recognized by their red caps and the wet hems of their pants and skirts. Why they wear red caps is a mystery. Was Little Red Riding Hood (a.k.a. Red Cap in the Grimm version) really a nixie?  These folks don’t menace anyone, but the prices of their goods predict the future prices–if they sell high, prices go up, but if they sell low, prices go down. How they manage to grow flour and cows under the water is not explained

Some water-women are beneficial in other ways, such as the Lady of the Lake of Avalon in the Arthurian cycle.

This would be the time to get all Freudian and Jungian, musing on the unconscious and the anima, the intuitive and the psychic, or to consider the water-ape theory of evolution, as a race memory of  living in the edge of the waters, like manatees, or even of being in the womb surrounded by water. But  I won’t go there–others have already worked that field, adding to the fascination of the beings that live in the water.

I think we all need to believe in a different, less mundane life than the one we lead, and the fantastic creatures of alien worlds give us more scope for imagination.

Sources:

Neck, Water Nixie, and others, Scandinavian Mythology from Wikipedia

Sacred Texts – http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfm/tfm056.htm

Ashliman, D.

Water Spirit Legends 1 http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/water.html

Water Spirit Legends 2 http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type4050.html

The Water Nix,  Sur La Lune  http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/79waternix.html

Tales of the Motherless Child

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When I started doing research for Maven, most of the fairy tales I knew involved girls who were set upon by their stepmothers, girls who had no mothers present. Even Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is separated from her mother, to be raised by three silly fairies. Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty, Rapunzel, and even Little Red Riding Hood were separated from their mothers.

Boys too are often motherless, such as the youngest son in many tales,  Peter Pan,  and even Harry Potter. Others, like Jack and the Beanstalk, may have an ineffectual mother who has not been able to impart any sense into her son.

Many of the women I know from the Boomer generation seem to have mother-issues. I wonder how much of this is based on the image of the Evil Older Woman: stepmother-witch.

If you watch fantasy/sci-fi TV and movies, you’ll see that there are few mothers present. They tend to fall into three categories: the golden anima of the entire series (Martha Kent on Smallville),  the wicked witch of the series (Angela Petrelli of Heroes), or comic relief (both Sheldon’s and Howard’s mothers on The Big Bang Theory).  Mothers in fairy tales are dead.  This robs the protagonist of guidance and support, so he or she enters the story with naiveté and innocence, vulnerable to evil.

Bruno Bettleheim and Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggest that these dead,  “too-good mothers” represent the child’s desire to return to infancy, to being held, nursed and closely attended by a mother–or even a desire to return to the womb.  The real mother, the one who has her own life to lead, her own issues, is seen as the evil one, the one who says “no,” or “go to bed” or “do your homework.”  The conflict between child and mother is not negotiated in fairy tales, the child does not learn how to be an adult among older adults.

How hard it is to become one’s own self, yet at some point to see one’s mother’s face in the mirror. How hard it is to allow one’s child to grow into his or her true self, without withdrawing approval or trying to control.

Perhaps our cultural fear of the older woman comes from this story motif–the anxiety of separation that begins with the terrible twos, and never really ends. Maybe it has to do with the idea that a woman loses her value with her fertility–women are the only mammals that survive their fertility.  Perhaps it is because our great-grandmothers did not often live to see 40, especially if they had many children.

A girl born today is likely to live into her 80s or even longer, but many of the Depression babies are still around, approaching their 80s,  and the Boomer girls are entering their 60s. Nobody expected that we would live this long–Social Security was never set up for people to be retired for as many years as they worked.

Will our motherless child stories begin to reflect the very large and growing numbers of grandmothers in our society? It is speculated that the appearance of the grandmother–someone who at 30 was elderly enough to have seen an entire generation grow up and begin a new generation–was a factor in the development of civilization.

What would a preponderance of grandmothers create?  Not to mention Fairy Godmothers?

Who wants to read about a middle-aged heroine?

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Traditionally speaking, the audience for science fiction has always been teen-age boys, and for fantasy, both teen-age boys and girls–perhaps explaining the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter novels. Rowling has created an incredibly detailed fantasy world that lies just a step away from the mundane muggle world, a world that is saved seven times by a group of teens.

Yet teenaged readers grow up. Many of them continue to read science fiction and fantasy, if the attendance at the SF conventions I have attended is any evidence. At DragonCon in Atlanta, originally a gaming con, there are lots of younger folk, under 30, but a large proportion is over 40 as well. At DarkoverCon and the recent DiskworldCon, the under-30 crowd was not much in evidence, perhaps due to the lack of excellent blockbuster movies made from Marion Zimmer Bradley and Terry Pratchett’s wonderful books. Why Spielberg, Verbinsky,  and others have not seen the incredible potential in these stories and characters is beyond me. Maybe it’s because the characters are typically NOT teenagers, who after all, are the only people who go to movies, right?

Frodo was over thirty, after all, as was Gandalf, Strider, Eowyn, et al. Even the actors for most movies who play teenage heroes are in their thirties…the Potter gang being notable exceptions.

I think the time for ageism in fantasy and science fiction is over. While we are all 18 with more or less experience, some of us old farts still buy books, still go to movies, still go to cons, and even buy action figures, models, computer games, and posters.  We don’t have the disposable income of teens–since we are often supporting said fanbase, but we do shell out some ducats on occasion.

And maybe it would help if the young gun movie makers would look beyond their own fear of age and death to see the value of the elder–such as Spock Prime.

Fairy Tales I Love to Hate

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And they were married and lived happily ever after.  Yeah. Right.

My interpretation of the most popular of these stories–Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White was “if you’re a good girl (stupidly naive), and you wait long enough (while keeping your tormentor’s house clean), he will come.”

The other variation is Beauty and the Beast, in which taming the beast is the task: “If you love him enough, he’ll change.”

They didn’t have a 50% divorce rate in those days because people just didn’t get divorced.  Of course I’m a two-time loser at the marriage game, so maybe I’m just not sanguine.

Ptui!

How many women continue to wait for some man to complete their lives instead of building their own life, which ironically would be likely to attract a man that they would like and that would be worthy of them? How many women go back again and again to a beast, believing that he will change, that they have not loved enough?

Why would we want to teach our daughters this kind of story?  After all, it’s just a fairy tale.

One answer is that the older fairy tales were not so focused on love’s first kiss (sexual initiation) as these are. The versions of these stories we know well were written by Charles Perrault in the late 1700s, based on stories made up by upper class women whose fantasy involved meeting and marrying someone for love, not for family influence and monetary gain.

Most marriages in society at that time were arranged, with little or no input from the girl–sometimes as young as twelve years of age. Shakespeare’s Juliet at thirteen is already older than her mother was when Juliet was born. The father plans to marry Juliet to Paris, who is twenty.  To marry in the first days of teenage infatuation is not only a fantasy, but too tragically true in its results. Their only path to security was marriage, preferably to a strong, rich and upper class man, the eventual ruler of the kingdom, and if they managed to fall in love, that was okay too. Just not required.  Even in cultures where arranged marriages are no longer mandated, marrying for love is seen as lower class or simply foolish.

And the other is that we girls would really like to be the princess, with the tiara and the taffeta dress, and never have to clean house again.

Where are the stories to teach us how to make good choices, to grow our own potential, and even to attract the kind of prince with whom we could build a life? Barbie?

Looks like I need to write some.