Seeking redemption in 'The King of the Golden Mountain'

One of the nice things about fairy tales is that it’s usually not that hard to find something redemptive about them if you make that your focus.

Whether it’s because there’s something archetypal about the divine Logos and its story of redemption that has permeated the whole of creation, or it’s because Christianity has become so foundational to Western civilization, philosophy and literature the past 1,700 years, the fairy tales that we’re familiar with in Europe and North America lend themselves readily to a christological interpretation.

Thus we can see Christ figures in the Prince Charmings who awaken Snow White and Sleeping Beauty from deathlike sleeps, or who free Cinderella from a life of bitter slavery and oppression in a family where she doesn’t belong. In each of those women we also can see types of the church, pining for redemption at the hands of its true bridegroom.

Less overtly, fairy tales often contain lessons about justice, fidelity and courage, or even simple warnings about the dangers of evil. Messages often convey themselves through anthropomorphic animals or magical enchantments, but if you listen to the story, it's easy to find rich veins of meaning just waiting to be mined.

“The King of the Golden Mountain” is a curious exception. This is not a cautionary tale like "Red Riding Hood," or a romance like Cinderella and Snow White. It's more an adventure story told in the vein of Sinbad. There's a hero, and fantastic things happen to him.

This story, told by the Brothers Grimm, begins much the same way as the classic story of “Beauty and the Beast,” with a merchant who has lost his wealth in a series of shipping disasters. As the tale begins, he makes one of those Faustian bargains common to folklore with a dwarf, or manikin, promising to restore the man’s wealth if in 12 years he gives him the first thing to rub against his leg when he returns home that day. The man agrees and, of course, that thing turns out to be his son.

As the story goes, the manikin is unable to hold his claim to the boy when the 12 years have passed, and the boy is set adrift down a river, where he ultimately comes to an enchanted castle, complete with a princess under an enchantment, at the Golden Mountain.

There the youth has to suffer a series of indignities in silence over three nights, ending in his death, without ever breaking his silence. When he completes this act, the spell is broken and the enchanted princess and has been freed, she pours the Water of Life on the dead youth and restores him to life.

Tom Stoppard once wrote that any story, if you let it go long enough, will end in death. That’s a great thing for tragedies, but the truth is that stories end best if you know when to stop telling them. “The King of the Golden Mountain” would be a much better story if this were where it ended, with the enchanted princess rescued, the youth restored to life, and the two of them happily married.

Alas, the story continues.

What happens next is that after more time has gone by and the youth is a father, he convinces his wife against her better judgment to let him visit his parents. She does, by presenting him with a magic ring that will transport him anywhere by twisting it and wishing to be there ― with the condition that he promise not to use it to wish her and their son to join him there.

As this is a fairy tale, he ends up doing just that, and it turns his wife against him, so that her love turns to contempt and she returns to the mountain with their son by using the magic ring. During the rest of the story he has to work his way back to the Golden Mountain, which he accomplishes by stealing the inheritance of a trio of giants. When he returns home, he finds his wife about to marry someone new, prompting him to kill everyone.

I like to deconstruct fairy tales when I read them to my girls, because it makes it easier to retell them later on. This is a story where it’s hard to find any way to do that reasonably.

The man dies to free the princess and her castle from enchantment; there’s definite Christ imagery there, especially when you consider his resurrection. The princess brings him back to life, and that’s Christ imagery too. Despite these obvious connections, there’s virtually nothing Christlike about these people.

The king's behavior is monstrous. He steals the inheritance of three orphans, breaks an oath to his wife, and then slaughters dozens of wedding guests and his wife.

The wife is jealous and petty. She has no reason for her husband not to see his family, but she hates the idea anyway, and then abandons him far from their home when he lapses in his judgment and magically whisks her to his side despite his promise.

This is one of those stories where no one is commendable, decent, or noble, and it makes a piss-poor story unless you just want a story with lots of fantastic things happening with seven-league boots, magic rings, and dwarfs. As an adventure story, it could work with some embellishment, but there’s still nothing satisfying about the protagonist unless there is some sense of moral compass added to him beyond getting what he wants.

You could embellish the tale of the three nights in the castle, and the torment he goes through to free the enchanted princess, and that could be a good story if it ends on their wedding, or even with her release, whether she restores him to life or not.

That actually would be an interesting story, to be honest; where a hero does the right thing, dies by it, and never gets to experience the joys his victory brings to others.

Or if there something more to the several-years marriage between the man and the princess that explains why she is so incensed by his breach of promise. I’d welcome that story too, where he throws away everything she gave him and has to win it back ― as opposed to conquering it back.

It’d even be decent as fairy tales go if it follows the story the Brothers Grimm set, and after he regains his kingdom ― which is his only stated concern when he sets out again, not to find his wife and child ― and his existence proves empty and barren without his wife and child, and all these people’s ghosts haunting him. That, too, would be a nice story.

I like all those retellings to an extent, but I keep finding myself drawn back to the Water of Life the princess uses to restore her rescuer after he is beheaded on the third night. The water, which in another story restores an ailing king to his full health, is a typological reference of Christ, whom the gospels say brings life to the dead, sight to blind, and so on.

I haven’t taken the potential for retelling as far with this as the other options, but the story might have an interesting reinterpretation lying in the opportunity the water itself brings for new life, a new beginning ... and the ways we often squander those new beginnings. Redemption and forgiveness are so easy to find, and yet we too often pass it by when the chance comes.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.

deconstructing jack and the beanstalk

Jack and the Beanstalk is an interesting sort of fairy tale.

Like other stories, fairy tales have a function besides mere entertainment value. "Red Riding Hood" serves to warn children not to talk to strangers, who pose the danger of death and sexual assault. "The Frog Prince" is a lesson in honesty and keeping one's word, while "Hansel and Gretel" speaks of the value of courage, teamwork and quick-wittedness. Even the stories of Chaunticleer at least have a sort of gallows humor going for them, the way death can come from any direction, as it too often did during the Middle Ages.

But "Jack and the Beanstalk" is about a boy who breaks some of the oldest laws of civilization, by betraying his hostess and killing her husband after stealing one treasure after another. It's an adventure story, to be sure, but it's not much of a morality tale.

In fact, as fairytale heroes go, Jack is neither particularly smart nor brave, He's just lucky. A stranger tells him that beans are magical, and Jack is gullible enough to trade away his cow for these beans rather than getting enough money from the sale of the cow to buy a calf or a couple goats. To his good fortune, it turns out that the beans actually are magical, and his life changes.

When I was a child, I always assumed that the man who gave Jack the beans was some sort of con artist, taking advantage of Jacks's naivete to get a cow for the cost of beans. But this doesn't make much sense; the man who gave him the beans told him that the beans were magical and they were.

It's far more likely that the man knew they were magical and sold them to Jack to effect change in Jack's life. This deliberate of benevolence sets in motion the events of the fairy tale. In a fit of anger over Jack's apparent foolishness, his mother throws the beans through the window and they grow overnight into an enormous beanstalk that reaches into the very heavens,

At this point Jack goes from the childish faith in believing in magic beans to a more adult outlook that fills him with curiosity and boosts his courage enough for him to seize the opportunity before him and climb the beanstalk.

At the top of the beanstalk, Jack also finds wealth and the story becomes more complicated. In many versions of the story, the items that Jack takes -- gold coins, a hen that lays golden eggs and finally a magic harp that  plays tiself -- belong to the giant, making Jack a simple thief. The Brothers Grimm throw an interesting wrinkle in when they reveal, via Jack's mother, that these things all had belonged to Jack's father until they were stolen years before.

I'd suggest that this doesn't make as big a difference as we might thing. The fairy tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected were stories that were told by peasants and lower-class workers all over what we now call Germany. The heroes of the stories invariably were simple people like they were, people who made progress by old-fashioned work or by simple cleverness that in the imaginary fairytale world won them the gratitude of kings and the hands of beautiful princesses.

Fairytale heroes like Jack, in other words, were people who lived under a feudal system where the fruits of their labors were taken from them by kirke and by king, by clergy and by rulers who were distant and removed from day-to-day life. They were unmoveable and unreachable, and lived a life of comfort so far off that they might as well have lived atop a beanstalk in a kingdom in the sky.

In this sense the giant represents the king or lord of the manor. With this reading, "Jack and the Beanstalk" becomes a mildly subversive tale about taking back from the rulers what they themselves have unjustly taken from the people who produced it.

Now let's revisit the man who gave Jack the magic beans. We've already established that he wasn't a simple con artist out for Jack's cow. He knew what the beans would do, and he gave them to Jack so that they would grow the beanstalk. He knew that if Jack climbed the beanstalk it would take him to the giant's castle, and he knew that once Jack was there, he would find the treasure. Presumably he also intended that Jack should take the treasure.

This is no con artist. In the framework of the story, the man with the beans is an agent of justice. He is a Christ figure in the literary sense, giving the oppressed Jack the opportunity to regain what was taken from him and to punish the perpetrator at the same time. If the giant does in fact represent the lord of the manor, "Jack and the Beanstalk" isn't just an interesting fairy tale.

It's positively revolutionary.


Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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deconstructing red riding hood

The wall is black.

Where is Christ in "Red Riding Hood?" Is he the grandma, who is killed by the wolf, and who satisifies the wolf's hunger so that he spares Red Riding Hood? Is he Red Riding Hood herself -- no, I think perhaps what is striking about "Red Riding Hood" is itslack of chrisocentric imagery. It is a world of lawlessness, where the mighty and the powerful prey upon the weak and defenseless with remorse. It is a land given over to savagery, and the innocent cannot survive.

One could contend that it is Red's failure to obey the rules of her world that gave the wolf the means to destroy her. That is certainly the traditional reading, which we despise for its cruel savagery -- that if little girls do not listen to their parents, they will be raped and killed in the worst ways imagineable.

That's the chief reason we've added the huntsman and the impossible salvation that he brings. We would much rather celebrate the myth that says that the innocent will be avenged and the wicked punished, and more importantly we want to believe that no mistake is so bad that we cannot be rescued from it and its consequences ameliorated.

So perhaps that is the better story: The wolf kills Grandma, and he kills Red Riding Hood, but the woodsman kills him and ends the wolf's reign of terror in the woods/forest community. One can see wolf and hunter locked in a battle of wills, the hunter giving or losing all he has, to fight until at last he lays the wolf low.

Another story I can draw from this is one of lawlessness and nihilism. There is no God, no Christ, and each does as he wants. The wolf kills Red Riding Hood because he can. She feasts on her dead grandmother's flesh because she is hungry, and the woodsman kills the wolf out of spite, the way a child might kill an ant simply because it amuses her to do so.

A story like that is simply horrifying, and though I can imagine it, I rather doubt I would have the stomach to write it. It is too raw, too violent, too decidedly animlistic and lacking any virtue that separates us from the animal world. I imagine that nearly all of us would pull away from such a tale rather than immerse ourselves in it. In such a world, which lacks all sense of God or any law of morality, even the fruitless injunctions of Red Riding Hood's parents to stay on the path and talk to no one lacks any talismanic power to protect, or any authority to compel Red Riding Hood to obey.

cinderella revisited

Tonight my daughter made my day. Her mother was reading her "Cinderella" -- Evangeline's favorite story at the momenet -- and she objected to the story content. She didn't like the fact that Drizella, Anastasia and their mother were so mean to Cinderella, and wanted them to be nice instead.

That's good. She's starting to see how the way we behave toward other people can affect them, and that bad choices have bad consequences not only for ourselves but for other people.

Too cool, huh?

On the other hand, "There once was a girl named Cinderella who lived happily and then lived happily ever after" doesn't make much of a story.


Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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red riding hood

Want to hear a gruesome children's story? Try a fairy tale.

"Little Red Riding Hood" is a great example. In one of the older versions of the story, the wolf goes to the grandmother's house, kills her, pours her blood into a bottle and lays her cut-up flesh out on a platter. And it's just getting started.

Along comes Red Riding Hood. The wolf -- dressed as Grandma, and waiting in the bed -- tells her, "I've laid out some meat and some wine for you."

Red Riding Hood drinks the wine, and a voice cries, "Slut! to drink your own grandmother's blood!" She eats the meat, and a voice cries, ""Whore! to eat your own grandmother's flesh!"

From there, Red Riding Hood is instructed to undress and throw her clothes into the fire and then join her grandmother in the bed to warm her up. The story follows the traditional big nose, big eyes, big teeth routine -- and then wolf eats her.

Finis.

It's a positively gruesome story. No woodsman comes to save them with an ax. There is no miraculous rescue from the wolf. It's essentially a metaphor for the girl's rape and a warning about the dangers of traveling alone and not listening to your parents.

And if you think the Brothers Grimm had gruesome and disturbing fairy tales, consider that they actually cleaned them up from the stories they had heard as children.


Copyright © 2003 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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