(no subject)

[skygiants]

FOR HER BIRTHDAY (HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEST NNYFACE!), nny asked me about what myths and fairytales and stories I grew up with.

I was going to start this out by saying I don't remember being told stories as a child, but now that I think about it, that's actually not true. My parents did tell me stories -- just not general sorts of myths or legends or fairy tales. They told me stories about themselves, their childhoods, and their parents. And, of course, in a very real way those stories were myths and legends and fairytales. My mother's mother, the one I never met -- who jumped into fountains to get pennies out for her children instead of throwing them in, who decided it would be fun to ride on top of a car instead of inside it and broke her leg, who invited an agoraphobic patient to live in her basement with his pet monkey as a kind of live-in babysitter, or so I was told -- was pretty much the trickster figure of my childhood, moreso than Loki or Hermes or Anansi. And I had not made that connection until just now, actually, and it's kind of a weird thing to realize.

So that was one kind of story I grew up with. As for the others, the myths and fairytales that people tend to think of, I bumped into them mostly the usual kind of way, and some less usual. Disney, of course -- I was exactly the right age for the Disney comeback era of the nineties, and very clearly remember The Little Mermaid taking preschool by storm. But I also remember watching Into the Woods when I was five or six, and subsequently watching it, like, ALL THE TIME. I think I must have known the stories by then that Into the Woods takes off of, because I must have known them in order to internalize the lesson that I very clearly did internalize -- that stories are always more complicated, both funnier and more serious, both more ordinary and more strange, than the first version that you hear. That stories are, first and foremost, full of real people, who fight about stupid things and are heroic in the weirdest ways. Into the Woods is a very foundational part of the way I've approached stories, always. (Diana Wynne Jones is of course a part of that too, but that's news to no one.)

And I got older, and read as many books of myths and legends as I could get my hands on, and as many books of everything else, too. I remember that I went through a phase where Rapunzel was my favorite fairy tale, for reasons beyond the recall of the current administration; then I went through a longer phase where Tam Lin was my favorite, for reasons that are pretty easy to target, thank you, Pamela Dean. But once you start getting into all the different books and stories I read and absorbed as a kid, that's a different question, and not, I think, the one that's being asked.

Oh, one last thing, though -- I was thinking, "wow, isn't it telling that all of the myths/legends/fairytales I'm thinking of are pretty British Isles and Brothers Grimm, and that I didn't hear about, say, golems or Chelm for so many years later?" But of course I did know religious stories, I knew about Moses and Noah, I had a short book with my name and my brother's name printed in it from some novelty printing website in which Rebecca and Ben Went on a Time-Traveling Adventure to Learn the Meaning of Hanukkah. I just didn't think about those when you asked about myths and legends and fairy tales, because in some weird way -- even though they TOTALLY ARE! - they don't fall into the myth and legend and fairy tale category in my head either. That's another thing about myself I hadn't realized.

Comments

[next_to_normal]

INTO THE WOOOOOODS. You know, I cannot actually remember a time when I hadn't seen Into the Woods? There must have been, because I'm pretty sure I heard the "traditional" versions of those fairy tales first (for context, if nothing else). But ITW has always, to me, been the "real" version, because it seemed more true, I guess, that life doesn't just stop at happily ever after.

And then people would look at me funny when I explained to them that no, Cinderella did not actually end up with the Prince. She eventually left him and moved into a house with the Baker, Jack, and Little Red Riding Hood.

[skygiants]

I honestly don't remember the first time I saw Into the Woods either, just remember the aftermath -- my parents failed really frustratingly at videotaping the show off PBS, so our version cut off right at the beginning of "Last Midnight," but man, I watched that old VHS recording of 3/4 of Into the Woods ALL. THE TIME. Then I would rent the full version from the video store so I could see the end.

[next_to_normal]

Haha, my mother videotaped it off PBS, too! I had the whole thing, but I watched it so many times I wore out the tape.

One day I put the tape on (it was very exciting, because I was showing it to my cousin for the first time) and it was all, "You wish to go to the festival?" "The... fest... iv... uhhhhhhhhhh -" and ground to a halt.

There were tears.

I now own that sucker on DVD and VHS, just in case.

[katarik]

Ohhhhhhh Into the Woods and Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, yesssssss. Tam Lin is one of my favorites anyway, but hers is absolutely glorious. I first saw Into the Woods when I was in high school and, um, promptly acquired the VHS and the soundtrack.

Hm. Finals are nearly over. It is clearly time for a reread.

[skygiants]

Pamela Dean's Tam Lin was, like, my vision of What College Would Be Like Oh Glorious Poetic College for YEARS. I feel like Pamela Dean has perhaps misled a lot of people that way, since my college was not at all like that ... but I brought the book with me every time I went back and forth, regardless. It was one of the ones I wouldn't move without.

[thistleingrey]

very clearly remember The Little Mermaid taking preschool by storm

Oh, wow, whereas my high school (which cohabited with a self-conscious HS of the Arts for a while) staged Into the Woods, and a few of us went to see Little Mermaid at the cinema and sort of sneered at it. I mean, not so much wow the distance between my agemates and yours, but it had not really occurred to me till now that there's a distinct privilege to having been able to sneer at Little Mermaid and its ilk.

I grew up on family stories, too, both sides, though with odd echoing silences on my father's for perhaps obvious reasons.

[skygiants]

Hee, yep! I mean, I had a copy of the Anderson version that I don't remember when I acquired -- it still lives in my room, actually, because although I have no intrinsic attachment to the story, it's really beautifully illustrated -- and I do remember the sort of feeling of smug superiority upon learning that Disney got things WRONG and I could TELL people about that. But there is probably no doubt that Disney came first.

The places where the silences are are also really interesting. There were absolutelycertain relatives I never heard stories about.

[sovay]

Into the Woods is a very foundational part of the way I've approached stories, always. (Diana Wynne Jones is of course a part of that too, but that's news to no one.)

Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1989) did me the same service when I was eight. If you haven't read the novel, I recommend it very highly. It is told in interlocking, deconstructing layers of myth, history, balladry, anecdote, and folktale—the myths lay the groundwork for the story, the songs and the tales precipitate out of it, hybridize with it in popular memory, are back-scattered into it to confuse the facts, and all is framed by the critical analysis of a historian whose attempts to excavate through all this cultural geology to the truth of the story would be even more admirable if he weren't so glaringly wrong about his central thesis: he is proceeding from the position that magic does not exist. He is trying to disinter, euhemeristically, the real events that underlie the fables of shadow sisters and greenfolk, missing the fact that the women who step out of mirrors and die with their doppelgängers and the archaically-spoken, elf-like creatures through whose realm time does not pass ordinarily were real. And so he keeps missing the shape, just as the ballads romanticize or elide, the folktales cherry-pick, the archaeology is incomplete. The book requires the reader not only to read a dozen variants of itself, but to read them against each other (and the history of their fictional country, which is inferred mostly from between the lines). I didn't know that was metafiction when I was eight. I only knew it taught me to ask about stories, not just hear them.

(The sequel White Jenna (1990) is quite good, even though I didn't get hold of it until high school and it shifts some of the world so radically, it took me a re-read to acclimate without not so much disappointment as disorientation. I do not acknowledge the existence of The One-Armed Queen (1998). The whole point of the world is the light-and-dark mirroring, the pairs; a third book throws it off structurally, never mind the fact that it isn't—in addition to all the symbolic problems—very good.)

[skygiants]

I read it - Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna in an omnibus together as a duology titled The Books of Great Alta, which I think probably changes the experience quite a lot - but so many years ago, and during such a busy period of early college, that I think it probably deserves a reread. I've been meaning to revisit a lot of Jane Yolen, actually, after hearing her speak once or twice at conventions in recent years.

[nny]

Thank you thank you thank you.

(My sister had one of those books! But Connie didn't learn anything, she saved the Smarties that had been stolen.)

[skygiants]

<3333 thank you for a super prompt!

(BEING YOUR OWN HERO in one of those books is also very important!)