Not Just So

I have my favourites just as I am sure you have yours, those tales, told in childhood, which have a lifelong resonance.  My grandfather was a particularly good story-teller, both in fact and in fiction, meaning that he could tell true stories and tall stories with equal verve and conviction! 

Those I liked best he told me time and time again.  I loved them, so much so that I would not tolerate any deviation.  Like Josephine, Rudyard Kipling’s lost daughter, for me the tales of a grandfather had to be ‘just so.’  He was my best beloved; they were my best beloved. 

It was this ‘just so’ attitude that came increasingly to mind as I worked my way through Philip Pullman’s recently published Grimm Tales for Young and Old in a New English Version.  I enjoyed it…up to a point, though I have to say more for his approach than for his telling.  Hold on a moment or two.  I promise to become a little less cryptic!

The Grimm Tales, which I also know from childhood, are likewise in the ‘just so’ category of narration.  When I was learning German, getting to the stage just beyond the foothills of grammar and parsing, it was to the Grimm Brothers I turned, those beautiful, simple stories in beautiful and limpid prose, as clear as glass.  Even in another language they were just as I remembered, though perhaps a little darker, a shade or two grimmer. 

What I love about them most of all is their child-like simplicity, though these peasant folk tales were not devised for children.  The point is, I think, that the outlook of an older, rural and less complicated world is not that far removed from the outlook of children. There are no shades of grey.  Good is good and bad is bad. And the really bad are made to dance to death on red hot iron slippers.  Quite right!    

It’s a world of bright light and sinister shadows, of handsome princes and ugly witches, of forests and of towers, a wonderful, wonderful enchanted realm.  The imagery is simple and stark, the psychology non-existent.  Things are as they should be, as red as blood or as white as snow.  It’s a pre-Christian world, a pagan world, a world where justice comes as retribution and revenge. 

It needs no explanation; the tales contain their own morals and their own simple truths.  There is no need for metaphysics and metatheory; all judgement, all adult preconceptions, have to be abandoned.  The paradox here is that Pullman’s theory that is not a theory for me was the best part of the whole book! 

Now I open my copy at his introduction.  Here I see one passage, heavily underlined, an expression of my papal imprimatur.  Pullman says he is not interested in the “ponderous interpretations” to which the tales have been subjected.  He is not interested in the “…Freudian, Jungian, Christian, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, post-modernist and every other kind of tendency.” 

Spot on!  I have no time for all of this sub-Jungian twaddle either.  The point is that this entire ponderous explanatory superstructure is not just so; this is just so much extraneous rubbish; this is the tendentious uses of enchantment school.  Pullman believes that most of the interpretations offered are little more than seeing pleasant patterns in the sparks of a fire, doing no harm.  Well, perhaps, though for me much of the over-intellectualising is little better than a verbal form of the Emperor’s new clothes.  There is simply nothing there. 

Pullman is interested in the stories as stories.  Yes, yes; that is how it should be.  He came to my bedside.  I lie down, tucked-in, cosy and warm, under my duvet, waiting once again to be thrilled, charmed and beguiled. They are mostly there, the familiar like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood – a particular favourite -, along with the less familiar like Gambling Hans and Godfather Death. 

But, please, hold on: this is not quite right; this is not just so.  It’s clever, yes, but cleverness is not what I want.  The author has taken the tales at face value, part of an oral tradition, subject to change, variation and retelling over time.  The Grimms were guilty, if that is the word, of their own adaptations, which took a more gentrified form in their later collections.  Now Pullman has his spin, his retelling. 

But I want familiarity, I want to take the paths I remember; I do not want innovation, no matter how clever the story teller. I can’t say to Pullman, stop: I want it like this, not like that.  I can’t say that’s not what happened.  What works well for you does not work well for me.  That is the biggest disappointment of this book – there is simply too much Pullman.  The materials are beautifully dark enough without his over-voice and polish.   

Little Devils

Imps are little devils, an expression that means something quite different now than it did in the past. For, you see, little devils were literally little devils!

Traditionally imps were small; demons who served witches as familiars. They were able to fly through the air and, invisible to all, spread mayhem and destruction along the way. In those parts of Europe where witchcraft was closely associated with devil worship the belief was that a new witch, in attending her first sabbat, was personally given an imp by Satan himself. The imp was not so much a servant as a master, ensuring that the witch carried out her quota of wicked deeds.

Imps were also little vampires that had to be nourished with blood. The host was obliged to feed them, milk if they were mothers, blood if they were not. It was supposed that the witch grew an extra nipple specifically for her imp, located anywhere on the body. The search for this added nipple became one of the features of the witch-trials.

If the witch herself was unable to supply sufficient fluid the imp would set off on its own hunt, preying on local livestock, sucking them completely dry. On these hunts they would travel in the shape of familiar animals, bats, ferrets, hedgehogs or cats. Hence the continuing superstition that certain animals are harmful to cattle. Hedgehogs are still believed to steal cow’s milk, as are bats.

The image of the imp is most probably rooted in older folk beliefs, that of the shape-shifting spirits, not malevolent but friendly and helpful. In pagan Europe households as far apart as Lithuania and Italy once cherished snake spirits as household helpers. In Finland the Para were domestic spirits who assumed the shape of cats, frogs or snakes. In later folklore the Para were transmuted into goblins, magical and beneficial creatures.

As the horror of the witch trials, and the fear and ignorance that motivated them, slipped into the past the imp re-emerged in her original form, a figure of fun, mischief and humour, though sometimes with an acidy and sardonic edge. They entered popular imagination in Victorian times in Halloween postcards, shown not as animals but as red devils. One can find this kind of imp, fun-loving, lascivious and joyful, drawn to perfection The Halloween Tarot by Kipling West.

England, St Helena and the Magi

England is full of legends about the Magi, the three kings of the Bible. In the most popular Melchior, King of Arabia, the one who presented the gold, is considered to be elderly and grey-haired; Balthasar, King of Ethiopia, who gave the frankincense, is middle-aged, and Caspar, King of Tarsus, giver of the myrrh, is just a boy. The are particularly significant because all are linked to Saint Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, whom the English held to be the only daughter of Old King Cole, the supposed ruler of Britain who held his court at Colchester. By tradition she was held to have been born in this town, married the Roman general Constantius there, later giving birth to Constantine within the city walls.

Apart from her discovery of the True Cross and the Holy Nails it was once believed that she also journeyed to India, where she discovered the bodies of the Magi, taken from there to Constantinople. In 1413 the borough of Colchester adopted a new coat of arms, depicting the True Cross the Three Nails and the three crowns of the Magi. The local girl did good!

Screaming Skulls

I have another tale from the shores of old England, that of the screaming skulls. The story goes, and there are some twenty of them kept in various locations across the land, that if they are moved from their locations they either emit a screaming noise or generate poltergeists. They are said to be the skulls of former residents, preserved where they lived and died, in some cases allegedly going as far back as the fifteenth century.

Probably the best known is that at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, supposedly that of a black male servant, who is said to have come to England from the West Indies some three hundred years ago as a retainer for the lords of the manor, a family by the name of Pinney. Just before he died he expressed the wish that his body be returned to his native home for burial, but his wish was ignored and he was interred in the local graveyard. Soon after the moans and screams started, coming from the grave. The body was thereupon disinterred, and for some bizarre and unexplained reason the head was removed, and the skull later preserved in the house.

From time to time attempts have supposedly been made by successive generations of Pinneys to rid themselves of the relic. One occasion it was thrown into a pond, only to be recovered and set back in place when the screams became too much.

Ah, but the Bettiscombe skull, you see, whatever supernatural properties it carries, is not quite what it was traditionally held to be. It is neither male nor of eighteenth century origin. On examination in 1963 it was concluded that it was female and some two thousand years old. The suggestion is that it might conceivably a skull from an ancient Celtic shrine, associated with the cult of the head. These are powerful objects attended by powerful and sometimes disturbing forces. Be afraid, be very afraid. :-))