The colours of magic

Over the course of his long and prolific career, Jack Zipes has significantly challenged people’s understanding of what a fairy tale is, what a fairy tale can do, and who writes and collects them. His seminal study Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The classical genre for children and the process of civilization (1983) puts fairy tales in their cultural and social contexts, underlining the fact that they do not stand outside history, but may be deployed to different ideological ends. Alongside such studies Zipes has produced many anthologies, including Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French fairy tales (1989), which helped to bring critical attention to what specialists in the field now refer to as the conteuses, the influential group of women fairy-tale writers from seventeenth-century France.

We can read Zipes’s edition of Romer Wilson’s trilogy, Green Magic 1928), Silver Magic (1929) and Red Magic (1930), in light of his previous work and his attempts to grant critical attention to figures who have contributed to our understanding of fairy tales, but are unfamiliar today. Whereas women as writers of fairy tales, as in the case of the conteuses or the nineteenth-century German women writers of the Kaffeterkreis, have received increased critical attention, this has not been the case for the women editors who collected and published fairy tales. Figures such as the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs are common currency; less attention has been accorded to the work of Louise Michel (a Communard who published French and Kanak legends), Božena Němcová (a Czech nationalist who collected tales) or, until now, Wilson.

Born Florence Roma Muir Wilson in 1891, Wilson attended Girton College, Cambridge, before the First World War and embarked on a career as a novelist after it. Alongside novels such as The Death of Society (1921) and The Social Climbers (1927), she wrote a biography of Emily Brontë (1928). A tuberculosis sufferer, she died at Lausanne in 1930.

In his general introduction to these three volumes Zipes provides readers with biographical information about Wilson and sets out his view of her work on fairy tales. He maintains that her selection “reflects an erudite mind bent on displaying cultural treasures – namely fairy tales to challenge readers”, and that the importance of her collection resides in the fact that she “was one of the first anthologists of fairy tales to include major and minor fairy tales from all over the world”. The first two volumes were illustrated by Violet Brunton, a British painter, sculptor and illustrator; the third volume features drawings by the well-known Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen. The new edition includes all of Wilson’s tales, with the exception of, in Zipes’s words, “three long and boring stories”. He also includes a bibliography at the end of each volume, directing the reader to the author’s sources. Wilson herself penned clever introductions to each volume that blend personal reflections and historical (or pseudohistorical) observations on the subject matter. While her introduction to Green Magic suggests that this volume will focus on fairies, Silver Magic on giants and dwarfs, and Red Magic on dragons, the collections are in fact more heterogeneous than these introductions would suggest.

Particularly noteworthy are the framing devices with which Wilson presents each volume and each tale. She often speaks directly to the reader, even confessing in the introduction to Green Magic that her printer wants her to stop talking so she can relate tales about princesses and dragons, and so they can start printing the book. Here and elsewhere she is inclined to present fairy tales as “legends”. While fairy-tale narratives often lack grounding in a specific historical context or geographical location, legends are tales that claim some kind of historical basis or origin in a “real” place; in other words, legends imply a link to some kind of historical truth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries numerous authors and collectors made connections between historical figures and those of fairy lore. Louise Michel suggests that the historical Béatrix de Mauléon was the model for the ogress mother in Charles Perrault’s version of “Sleeping Beauty”, while in “The Seven Wives of Bluebeard” (1909), Anatole France provides the reader with a “real” history of Bluebeard and his wives that exculpates the mythic figure. Wilson’s framing of her anthologies corresponds to this broader trend of reshaping fairy tales in ways that transform them into legend.

She also blends the imaginary universes of fairies with reality, always leaving room for the idea that fairies actually exist. The introduction to Green Magic opens with: “Do you believe in fairies? I will tell you what I have heard from full-grown men and women on the subject”. Wilson won’t deny their existence out of fear of being “on the wrong side of the Good Folk”. She mentions fairy sightings in 1633 and 1691, and reports on the experiences of Sir Walter Scott and William Blake, among others, who bore witness to phenomena issuing from the fairy world.

Just as Wilson grants the possibility of the existence of fairies in Green Magic, in Silver Magic she makes a connection between the 9ft giants we see at the circus and the “prodigious” giants of times past. She goes on to associate the dwarfs of fairy lore with real-life dwarfs, citing as examples African pygmies and Inuit and Scandinavian little people. In the same veinRed Magic focuses on possible associations between dragons and Jonah’s whale, though suggesting a closer relation to the pterodactyl, “which once haunted the Thames valley”. Pterodactyls “patrolled the skies over the mud huts that would eventually grow into London and Paris”, she writes; “I feel sure that our dragon-stories had their beginning in tales of the Stone Age when people really were devoured by enormous winged things, when a man really was heroic who rid the countryside of one of these terrors.” But Wilson leaves room for the possibility of misperceptions that lead people to believe they saw such monstrous creatures, when in fact they didn’t: “I have seen him [a giant sea serpent] too … but he turned out to be a school of dolphins”. Even as she blurs the boundaries between the marvellous and “reality”, her frequent tongue-in-cheek comments also makes us wonder if she is a true believer or if she is just pulling our leg.

Sometimes the context of individual tales is historicized here, as well as their content. Regarding the opening tale of Green Magic, Charles Perrault’s “Puss in Boots” (quite embellished and elaborated, perhaps by Wilson herself), Wilson presents it as coming “From the French of Charles Perrault, as read to the Court of Louis XIV”. She then gives the reader a detailed description, based on fashion of the period, of how we might imagine the elegant attire of Puss and the Marquis of Carabas. She again claims that “Fortunatus and the Wishing Cap” was a tale “told to please the Court of Louis XIV”, perhaps by a Scottish ancestor of one of its characters, thus linking the tale to the history of the courtly storyteller. She situates the Grimms’ “The Goose-Girl in the Well” in relation to the “real” practice in southern Germany whereby a young boy or girl tends a flock of geese as if they were a flock of sheep. In her introduction to “The Werewolf” by Petronius in Silver Magic, Wilson notes that werewolves or loups-garoux exist in the Jura Mountains; the tale itself is evidence that “even the stolid Romans were not above such imaginings”. Undermining her assertions about the truth value of the tales she presents, Wilson also includes two songs by “Puss Prambula Compton”, who is supposedly “a Dutch cat born in Amsterdam”, but is in reality Wilson herself.

The author also points out correlations between similar types of narratives in ways that bring to mind the work of Otto Rank in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909), which lays out shared patterns found in stories from Graeco-Roman mythology, Biblical stories and folk tales. In Red Magic Wilson’s introduction to “Bluebeard” connects it to stories about Eve and Pandora. Introducing “Rich Peter the Peddlar”, which concerns an abandoned infant who rises in the end, she relates the folk tale to the stories of Moses, Romulus and Remus, and Perseus. With respect to “St George and the Dragon”, Wilson compares the hero to Hector of Troy.

Across the three volumes readers can relish stories about Baba Yaga, Ali Baba and Aladdin, Eskimo and French animal bride and bridegroom tales, and a trickster figure here and there. As Zipes knows well, anthologies carry out important work with respect to canon formation and framing how we understand a fairy or folk tale, and this understanding changes over time. As well as demonstrating the role that women collectors played in the history of the genre, Romer Wilson’s Magic books demonstrate this process in action. They are lively and intriguing, wonderful to see in print once more.

Anne E. Duggan is Professor of French at Wayne State University. She is the author of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The politics of gender and cultural change in absolutist France, 2021 (second edition), and editor of A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century, also 2021

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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