Ted's Reviews > The Fourth Pig

5! (NOT 4 1/2) think fantasy, not fairy tales



Short Review

This 1936 book is a collection of tales by Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999). I’d never heard of her before. I am in love awe.

Published by Princeton U.P. in a series called Oddly Modern Fairy Tales, the first story, The Fourth Pig, is narrated by the younger sister of the three brother pigs who we all know. She tells us that the Wolf is on the prowl, that he may be disguised “as kindly sheep or helpful horse”. She even wonders, “can I be sure that the Wolf is not in me, that I am not myself the Wolf’s finally clever and successful disguise? … My three brothers are now all afraid … I can sing the song still, the brave song of the pigs … and we will die waving the Pig banner … I know I am afraid, and afraid almost all the time … the noise of our singing doesn’t keep the fear out any longer. I can smell the wolf’s breath … I can hear the padding of the wolf’s feet a very long way off in the forest, coming nearer. And I know there is no way of stopping him. Even if I could help being afraid. But I cannot help it. I am afraid now.”

(None of the other tales are so tense and fearful as this one.)

But the book is not really a book of fairy tales, unless you mean the “oddly modern” type. This world that seems vaguely like the Brothers Grimm, is the fictional world of NM’s imagination. It is perhaps similar to the world of one of her most famous novels, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which “has been variously described as a love story, historical fiction, a mythic tale, a proto-feminist novel, a fairy tale, a questing story, pure fantasy, and a damn good book.” ( https://literarytransgressions.wordpr...)

NM was a champion of the lower classes, a vocal feminist and strong advocate for women’s rights (particularly birth control), taking up one banner after another for progressive causes, aiding in the Botswana independence movement, visiting African Americans and share-croppers in the U.S. south; all while writing scores of books over her long lifetime. The writer Ali Smith wrote an introductory essay for the 2009 edition of Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood, the first part of NM’s autobiography. And Marina Warner, in her Introduction, writes that NM “seems ripe for Bloomsbury-style fandom.”

The Intro is biography, appreciation, and literary critique. In it Warner writes of the reasons why Mitchison’s modernity is “less than complete”, one of which was her “passionate belief in the mythical imagination”, which she defended against “the high status of rationality and skepticism”; she liked to write of witches and witchcraft, and displayed a streak of neo-paganism. (None of this out of any personal belief system.)


Main Review


Marina Warner

Marina Warner also contributed the Further Reading list. Ms. Warner is both distinguished and accomplished, an academic historian, fiction writer and literary critic. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. Warner recently served as chair of the judging panel for the 2015 Man Booker International prize.


Naomi Mitchison

Following is my very loose paraphrasing of interesting stuff about NM from Warner’s Intro.

born in 1897 … grandparents wealthy landowners in Scotland, “with huge chilly castles, salmon brooks, deer-stalking … parents Liberal and progressive and brilliant … father John S. Haldane, distinguished medical biologist at Oxford, deeply concerned for working men and women … her older brother, J.B.S. Haldane, geneticist, biologist, a colossal personality; his transgressiveness, independent-mindedness, sheer cleverness set a bar for Naomi she was always longing to leap; Jack a free, wayward spirit, sacked from Cambridge for adultery with a colleague’s wife (whom he married), became a Communist, and later an Indian nationalist, renouncing his British citizenship … as children they experimented together on scientific questions … Jack went away to Eton, Naomi had to stay behind, even though she was the “rare girl” to attend the boy’s Dragon School in Oxford – her introduction to gender injustice. Her memoir Small Talk catches the stifling restrictions she suffered, never overcoming her ferocious jealousy of her brother – in her stories one finds stamped out “one spirited daredevil young woman after another – wild, strong-limbed and tousled, who break rules, act vigorously." Interjection: Haldane was one of three biologists in the 1920s who did the ground-breaking work resulting in the "modern synthesis" of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. What did science lose when Naomi was denied the right to pursue her first love, science?

Naomi, the faery child, has intense dreams and kept open the connection to childlike wonder and terror. ”I met a brown hare”, she remembers, “and we went off and kept house (marriage as I saw it) inside a corn stook with six oat sheaves propped around us.” She did not know then, she continued, that the hare is closely connected with the moon and the goddess, as well as with witchcraft. ”As I remember it, I was married young to the hare.”

Also a bookworm, by sixteen she had worked her way through The Golden Bough - "relations between magic and society, regeneration rituals, tree cults, all running a live current of atavistic ecstasy” through her writing. Greek and Celtic myths (especially Scottish); brought up among Oxford classicists, spending her summers in the Highlands; drawn to neo-paganism, wrapped in the Celtic Twilight; the varieties of the supernatural blossoming into “contrasting uses of enchantment”: avant-garde demands for liberty (Nietzsche, The Rites of Spring, The Plumed Serpent); and traditionalist nostalgia for a “lost, enchanted pastoral” (Peter Pan, Wind in the Willows).

The Introduction/biographical sketch goes on and on, page after page dense with my underlining and asterisks, check marks, indications of how amazed and affected I was with the tale of this amazing Edwardian woman. A narrative, filled with fact, but also a magical tale about a writer seemingly almost mythical.

Naomi, always acting with a purpose, never frivolous, sometimes playful but only to take a break from her serious concerns: the independence of Botswana, the feminist fights for equality and birth control, justice for the working class; or, to leave the plane of social activism, and move from there to the one of literary imagination … Trying to inject myth and magic back into the over-civilized, smoothed over, lackluster modern imagination, the day-to-day drudgery instilled by the industrial revolution, twisted and perverted beyond even the ravages of capitalism by the horrors of the World Wars; though at the time these tales were written, the Spanish Civil War was only announcing the specter of totalitarianism which was descending on Europe.

Which brings us to the stories.


The Tales.

In addition to stories, the tales in this book include six poems, a four-act play, and a short memoir.



Several of the tales are re-imaginings of various writings from the past: The Fourth Pig, Frogs and Panthers (a re-telling of Aristophanes’ play The Frogs), Hansel and Gretle, Adventure in the Debateable Land (a “Maiden in the Tower” story), The Little Mermaiden (closely connected to Hans Christian Anderson’s story), Brunhilde’s Journey down the Rhine (a take on Wagner’s version of the Burnhilde myth), and the play, Kate Crackernuts (based on a Scottish fairy tale that appeared in a collection in the 1890s).

These “oddly modern” re-imaginings are often totally new tales, the connection with a traditional version very thin, very tenuous, only enough to let the reader identify it before veering away down some untrodden path.

An example is NM’s “The Snow Maiden”. She may have started with something like this, which was known in English translation in the late nineteenth century: “Snegurochka, The Snow Maiden, is a character in Russian fairy tales. In one version, she is the daughter of Spring the Beauty and Father Frost”

NM’s take begins, “Once again the Snow Maiden was born, the daughter of January and April. Once again she was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again, for her safety, her parents sent her to life amongst the mortals … her name was Mary”.

As she grows up, Mary has goals and ambitions. She loves mathematics, and is friends with Bert, a like-minded boy. Then, when she was “near seventeen, and it seemed like it was sure she was to get a scholarship at the University”, the boyfriend of her friend Betty accosts Mary, putting his arms around her, “squeezing her up like the bad men on the movies.” Mary gets away, but the incident becomes known, and “there are some who said it was her fault, there always are when it’s a girl”; Betty, in a snit, lures Bert away from Mary.

From here things go downhill, in many different directions. When the 12-page story ends, Mary has eventually succumbed to the boy who accosted her, married him, and obeyed him when he tells her “to drop all this schooling – he didn’t want a scholar, he wanted a pretty kid to come back to in evenings.” And then – “well then, she just seemed to melt away, to fade right out somehow ... [and the tale comes full circle] Once again the Snow Maiden was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again he caught her and touched her with his rays, and once again the Snow Maiden melted away, was dissolved into nothing, became no more than a story which is ended.”

So this fable, originally about the made-from-snow daughter of mythical beings who melts when she finds human love, is radically recast, with the protagonist now a victim of social injustice and the belittling of women, leading to the vanishing not of the maiden, but of the maiden’s dreams.

There’s also a beautiful, poignant poem that treats a similar theme. Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man is a four page tale of the initial love of Mairi for her “fairy man”, then her gradual disillusionment over the years as she realizes what her lot in the relationship is. But she perseveres, and although she must bear heartache, insists that she is the fairy man’s creative equal.

It starts

Oh maybe ‘tis my rock
And maybe ‘tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.

I should be redding my house,
But oh, I’m stepping away
To hear high up in the fern
The tune that the faeries play.

Oh my bonny stone house
With the meal ark full to the brim!
But my fairy man’s in the fern
And I must go away to him.

And it’s Mairi, Mairi MacLean,
Ach, Mairi Maclean, come ben!
But I am stepping away
Adown to the hazelly glen.

Oh folks may look upon Jura,
And he may be rich who can,
But all the Isles of the Sea
Are for me and my fairy man!

The lilting rhyme seems to fly over the Highlands. Mairi’s disappointments not only fail to deter her, they are the source of her strength. The last stanza ends with her cry of equality:

Oh maybe ‘tis my rock
And maybe ‘tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.

Oh maybe ‘tis the meal ark
That stands beside the wall,
And maybe ‘tis the weaving,
And I’ll being seeing to all.

And maybe ‘tis the pot,
And maybe ‘tis the pan.
But I can write songs as good
As the songs of the fairy man!

The stuff of fairy tales.

There are only a couple tales that don’t have references to talking animals, magic spells, witches, fantasy lands, enchanted princes, mythical beings, etc. (For actual fairies, see next section.)

But these fairy tale ingredients are used by NM to make strange concoctions greater than the sum of their parts. There are other worlds in these stories, other places whose names move from one tale to another: Fairy Hill and Fairy Land; the Debateable Land; the Clefted Ground; even Middle Earth! (The Hobbit did not appear until the next year. NM and Tolkien were good friends, and she was a proof reader for The Lord of the Rings.)

What I was most impressed by in some of the tales was NM’s astonishing imagination. The example I remember most clearly is from Soria Moria Castle. The castle in question starts out a sand castle, made by the narrator - but by the second sentence she finds herself crossing the cardboard drawbridge into the castle, and before the first paragraph is over she has being led into the interior by a witch intent on eating her. This tale, over twenty pages long, chronicles the adventures she has in escaping the witch, which entail amazing alternative existences experienced, courtesy of her captor: first as a wheat plant, ground into flour and baked into a cake; then as a grape-vine, whose grapes are made into wine; finally as a piece of ore, made into a giant cannon. All these before finally escaping from the witch as the castle is washed away by waves.

Here’s some of the flavor of this inventive tale, from the five-page life of a grapevine.

The same sensations overcame me as had done so upon the first occasion [the wheat], shrinking and hardness and darkness. And again the tension, becoming unbearable, broke into pale, thready growing-points, a pushing up towards light and warmth and down towards dampness and anchorage. And again I grew and spread green leaves and sucked through their pores the gases which dissolved through my warm chloroplasts. But this time I was a stronger growth, my stem thickened and became the bud-points of branchlets … And so, for me as a vine, seasons went by, and at last I was to be part of the vintage … minute green cell clusters swelled to berries … I was aware too of the men who came, aware of their pride in me … I endured the pain of the summer pruning … knowing that the great purpose was coming closer upon us … More and more the “I” that I was became concentrated upon the ripening grape-bunches, purpose and intention of my existence … later … enclosed in the smoothly fitting glass of a wine bottle … I knew that we all waited to be poured into the tingling throats, the hastening blood, of men and women, who through us would become braver and happier and more generous, makers of songs and stories, adventurers and lovers. This was our noble destiny; for this we had once been given the name of a God. Thus then the embottled wine sang in the darkness of its Dionysian fate.

But the tale of the wine ends unhappily. Drunk by shallow and callous men, “it was my fate to set free not only the good in mankind but also the evil, not only the dreams of beauty but the nightmares of ugliness … I was dissolved and possessed by these men, and lost forever …”


Fairies.

Separate section because of the prevalence of the fairy people in these tales. Although there is quite a spectrum of views about fairies in mythology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy#Ch...), NM’s is likely the most common: that fairy-people are often antagonistic towards humans, and capable of going well beyond “mischief” in their dealings with us. They cast spells and work magic entirely for their own ends, and don’t much care how we get hurt.

The tales which give this view of fairies most forcefully are Kate Crackernuts, Adventure in the Debateable Land, and Mirk, Mirk Night - all of which I rated as 5 stars.


Heroines.

Some of the best tales in the book are those about, or told by, a heroine. I’ve already quoted from Soria Moria Castle.




Brunhilde's Journey down the Rhine can also be mentioned, but she’s a victim as well as a staunch warrior who, seeing her fate, laments to her horse the twilight of her idol.

Grane, my horse, my horse… let him still be my hero, let him be remembered as he was … Let the pyre to burn the body that was once wise friend of wood-birds, once queller of flames, once Siegfried … Because Siegfried was young and still wise on the mountain top , let build the pyre to wipe out fear with fear and flame with flame until all shall be even as at the first even spinning of the Norns. Let me topple now from the precipice of dark and unbearable flames into the light flames which must for a moment be borne, and then nothing will again be nothing as in the no-time before All-Father wished me into being. Grane, my horse, my horse, because all was once well it makes no difference to the ending.

Adventure in the Debateable Land (16 pp) finds the narrator in a taxi, a “voice” telling her she’s going to the Debateable Land. What for? “To rescue her, idiot!” says an old frog in the corner of the seat.

The taxi contains a long list of essentials, a short sample: “shoes of swiftness, seven league boots … cloak of invisibility … bridle for taming wild horses, drops of Water of Life, other drops of Lethe water for Dragon … gloves for handling red-hot iron …” During her adventure, most of her essentials are lost or stolen. She finally finds the tower holding the princess, but there’s five of them, all having turned into almost life-size dolls with china eyes - how to know which to rescue? She chooses the one on the left with the footstool. It’s the wrong one - but the young girl is grateful when she’s brought back to the taxi, since she’s a mill-hand in Middle Earth. “I’ve got to get off to work, but we’ll meet again.”

Mirk, Mirk, Night is the last tale in the book. An imaginative fantasy, a coming of age story, the quest which the heroine sets out on from Fairy Land is that of finding and rescuing herself, though she doesn’t understand how or why, or where she is attempting to escape to. Absolutely magical, really a stunning denouement. When I had read the last words I picked up my pen and wrote, just left wordless, pondering – very affected, the last referring to the tears in my eyes.


Poems

I rated the poems in a range of 3.5 to 5. These are the ones I liked a lot, besides Mairi MacLean (quoted above).

Pause in the Corrida, in which the opening line, “Black bulls of hate, charging across the mind, You are met here, are stopped here” is mindful of the Spanish Civil War.

Omen of the Enemy has this introduction: (On Friday July 12th 1935 a cormorant, usual disguise of the Evil One, alighted once again on the cross of St. Paul’s), and includes the lines
“… Must then all worship? …
Which of us not condemning our innocents to the maw of the cormorant,
Which of us will insist, against beak-thrusts in guts, against gold?
Who of us will stand, in London, will not bow down?”

And here’s The Border Loving, short and poignant.

The wan water runs fast between us,
It runs between my love and me,
Since the fairy woman has made him a fairy
And sat her down upon his knee.

Eden Water flows cold between us
And west of Eden the Solway tide,
But the fairy woman she came from Ireland
And my love stayed on the further side;
My loves lies snug in Carlisle Castle
With the changeling woman for year-long bride.

Waters of Tweed are deep between us,
Fierce and steep the unridden fells;
But the fairy woman watches the swallows
And tastes the clover and hears the bells,
And my love watches and hears and follows.