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.

After Happily Ever After

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What does happen after happily ever after?

There is a transformation in every story, the identity is revealed, the mystery solved, and the world brought back to rights. But the characters are new and different–how do they know how to act, what to do in their new circumstances?

Many stories end in the glow of new love, of new circumstances, of riches after poverty, of power after powerlessness. That is a good plaace to stop a bedtime story, but many of the older, longer versions of Cinderella type stories in particular, there are continuing problems.

The prince’s mother is often an ogress–and nobody has commented on what it is like to be married to a half-ogre–who has the intention of doing away with the new bride and her children. The mother-in-law orders the death of the children (like in Snow White) but the servants take the children away instead. The mother is accused of killing her children, and finally banished.  It generally takes seven years for the husband to get to the truth, often because he is often away at war, before he can find his wife again and recover their children.

But then the story ends again, and there is no explanation of how the separated lovers learn to live together again as the parents of half=grown children. What would happen if the ogress was successful–as she must sometimes be?

That’s the sort of problem that fairy godmothers want to stop before it happens. That’s why they listen to the story of the people involved to find out what they want, what their true intentions are and what can reasonably be done to change their circumstances so that they can get what they want.

But most people only get one wish–or they get only one story–so we don’t know what happens next. But Maven will be finding out as she deals with the aftermath of her first week on the job. All her clients’ stories affect other people, just as our own stories affect others, and so those folks are in line to become Maven’s clients too.  It gives the whole idea of teh butterfly effect a power more like the flapping of dragon wings as Maven works to give women more choices over the directions their lives take.  Fiona is not pleased. She has some not-so-happily after plans for Maven.

Where is Faery?

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Little Girl Fairies

Little Girl Fairies

Where is Faery? Does it appear like Brigadoon every 100 years? No, it overlays Reality just the way Reality underlies Hard Drugs.  Like Cyberspace, which  exists only in imagination but flows through physics, Faery is real,  except physics applies in Faery only when everyone present agrees that it does.  Faery exists just as Fiction does, except it lives by mutual consent not of the readers, but of believers who nail their suspenders of disbelief to the World Tree Yggdrassill, right beside the runes that surround the electric lime Jell-O.

The Twilight Lounge exists in a separate dimension, not actually in Faery, as those of the mythological persuasion believe, nor Cyberspace despite the presence of the KELVIN, yet further away than just beyond the projection room wall in the Café O’Lay, day and night spot of Due Now, SC.

It’s not even part of the HyperDimension where the mind goes out-of-body or some just go out-of-mind, aka Head Diving, Has-Been Depot, Hell’s Detention, or just Hard Drugs for those who can’t handle Reality

Let me explain what Faery is. Reality is the perceived interface of the Four Multiverses:  what you call Reality is the Accumulated Perspective of the Multitude, HyperDimension is where imagination flows along with chemistry, and Cyberspace is where imagination flows along with physics. Faery is imagination flowing around chemistry and physics through the quantum depths of the Collective Unconscious.

There are rumored dimensions of Calculus, much like the domain of the Mathemagician where Milo negotiated for the return of Rhyme and Reason, and Academia where training is all and results are none, where beings pray to the Muse to deliver them from the horned and tailed bearer of  Death, the Count of Accountability, a scythe-bearing  skeleton who drains the red blood to fashion it into blackened, dried representations of causes, effects,  analyses, and responses.

In Faery,  the spark between two separated quarks charms the strange landscape,  colors and flavors the neurons and lets the mind spin in just the right angle to do the timewarp shuffle and take that step to the left to see the wonder of “what if” and “I wish.”

Good wish or bad witch?

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What’s the difference between a wicked witch and a fairy godmother?

Cinderella and her (rather witchy) Fairy Godmother

Cinderella and her (rather witchy) Fairy Godmother

A wicked witch, as opposed to other witches, works magic to have power over others, to force them to do her bidding against their will A good working definition of evil is power over others, making others do what we wants against their will whether by magic or at gunpoint.  In many stories, such as Snow White, the witch appeals to the vanity or innocence of the victim in order to kill her, but to do it in a way that is a result of the victim’s action: Snow White accepts a comb,  a corset, and a poisoned apple from her disguised stepmother. The stepmother gives up the last of her beauty in order to kill Snow White, but she is unable to do so, showing the limits of the power of evil. Sleeping Beauty does not die, but only sleeps, and her family with her.  Cinderella’s stepmother is no match for the good luck her fairy godmother brings her. Cinderella does the rest on her own.  Baba Yaga does no evil against Vasalisa because Vasalisa’s doll tells her how to behave.

A fairy godmother changes the conditions so that the people who are wishing can do what they want to do.  The fairy godmother does not take action to make the wish come true, but only gives the wisher the items that are missing–a dress and a ride, all illusion– and sometimes only advice. The fairy godmother does not make the prince fall in love with Cinderella–that is Cinderella’s job, and it comes from her being who she is. The dress got her in the door, but then she had to play her role.

Evil Stepmother from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Evil Stepmother from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

The magical helper often tests her client with impossible tasks to see if the client will use the magical abilities–or friends–she has acquired.  Even the requests for a pumpkin, mice and lizards required some creative resources from Cinderella.  The fairy godmother does not create anything, but only changes the appearance.

How many of us have evil wishes–I wish he would fall in love with me, I wish she would lose her job, I  wish they would act differently?

Not only is forcing others evil, it is ineffective: a man convinced against his will is unconverted still.

The key to granting our wishes is to change ourselves. When we provide our own conditions-changing magic, it looks from the inside like we are doing all the work of making lifestyle changes, learning patience, taking the longer view, giving up outrage and powerlessness so that we can take action.

Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga from Vasalisa The Beautiful

It is our work, part of becoming who we are meant to be, of creating our own destiny. Cinderella’s patience and good humor while she was forced out of her rightful place as a daughter in her father’s house was her choice. It made her life bearable when others were doing their best to hurt her. She built her own magical power by doing the work, even mundane housework, by keeping a positive attitude and doing her best.

Snow While on the other hand, succumbed to evil because she did not listen to the warnings of her advisors and she did not pay attention to her own experience. Innocence is always lost, and the loss of instinct for danger is a bad sign.  It is interesting how male characters often appear as rescuers, but they are seldom if ever able to keep the wisher safe from herself.

Consider the father of Rapunzel who is forced to give up his child because of an imprudent wish made by his wife. I wonder what might have happened if they had just asked the witch for some of her greens?

Magic and miracles are not events, as they are portrayed in fairy tales; they are the results of process, of changing perspective, of making response-able choices and keeping hope strong–all the qualities of a good witch.

Are you a good witch or a bad wisher?

Who’s Maven? Why a Fairy Godmother?

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May years ago I was whining about teaching English in a community college, and I said that I felt like I had a lot of toads that I was supposed to turn into princes and princesses.  I felt like a Fairy Godmother.

I’ve always loved fractured fairy tales, since I also felt like the ugly stepsister, or the chubby brunette sidekick of the gorgeous blonde–if she would even acknowledge my presence…so finding fairy tales for fracturing sounded like a great idea.

I was newly single in those days, so I decided it was finally time to start my writing career and Maven Morrigan was born.  She started off in a computer bulletin board shared story, but she soon morphed into something else, an alter-ego and a way for me to stop telling my life to shrinks and start making story out of it. Most of what happens with Maven is true, except that it didn’t happen in just that way to those people in that order.

So I started writing little scenes, short stories, but they all sounded like chapters, and as my patient friends read them, they laughed in the right places, but they kept asking how Maven became a fairy godmother. So, despite the prevalence of prequels, I wrote the first part of the story first: Maven Fairy Godmother–soon to be published one way or another. I am hoping to hear good news from my agent, Jeanie Pantelakis, any day now. You can read an excerpt on Amazon.

This blog will be about the parts of the stories that haven’t worked themselves into a book yet, and may not ever. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about wishing, getting wishes granted and in short, being my own fairy godmother.