Snow Queen and the Huntsman?

I'm both intrigued by and worried about the upcoming Huntsman: Winter's War.  I have a soft spot in my thorny heart for Snow White and the Huntsman.  Besides being a gorgeous film, there were some vivid fairy tale archetypes and themes that hit my sweet spot: the waste land, the white stag, Ravenna as a crow queen and beauty as a weapon, etc.  It looks like this film is going to continue in that direction of powerful imagery, but I'm still hesitant to get my hopes too high.  At this point it's more of a general, nondescript feeling than a handful of solid reasons.

It's strange that the huntsman-part of the first film was made the series anchor.  At the end of SWATH, it felt like it was setting up for a sequel that would follow Snow, with a Snow White and the ____ title.  Ravenna was dead.  Okay, so they resurrected her.  I'll suspend disbelief.  But this is both a before and after with the supposedly defeated queen.  (Though I adored Charlize Theron's performance--that alone is worth watching!)

The adoption and expansion of the role of Hemsworth's huntsman will forever change our perception of the first film, and I don't like movies that do that.  I think it's sloppy story-telling, it changes the already-powerful and satisfyingly vague backstory of Ravenna in the first film.  I understand that they couldn't get Kristen Stewart back for a sequel, but they're creatives . . . they could have figured something out.  (For that matter, how about Emily Blunt in the role of Snow White?  She's a much better actress than Stewart.)

We've already had one Snow Queen disaster with Disney's Frozen.  Andersen's tale is my favorite, and I don't take kindly to loose or artless interpretations.  Emily Blunt's character could be done very well or not.   Though there is a symmetry in making the villain from Snow White and the Snow Queen related.  Come to think of it, wouldn't a better title have been Snow Queen and the Huntsman?

There's lots more that I'm wondering at; some of which make sense, I suppose, for entertainment purposes, but which doesn't please my demanding since of aesthetic!  I'm all over the map on this one, so enough from me.  What do you think?

Missing the Heart of the Fairy Tale

A Review of Disney's Frozen

I should be sleeping, or reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but I stumbled upon this review of Frozen and remembered that I had similar things to say about it.  So.

I liked Frozen.  It was funny, sweet, and well-animated, if a bit buggish (whatever happened to the beautiful, graceful characters from original Disney, making appearances as late as Princess Tiana?).  The songs weren't particularly moving, but I did get the refrain do you want to build a snowman? stuck in my head, so I suppose it was effective.  It takes place in a clear and easy-to-pinpoint location with decent attention to the visualization of culture and customs.  Being a fan of folk culture, and especially Scandinavian folk culture, I enjoyed that part of the film immensely.  But for our purposes here on Straw into Gold, it is imperative that I communicate the residual impression it left with me, which was this: Frozen was not, except by a deft maneuvering of the imagination, a fairy tale.

Minkyu Li, Frozen concept art

My problem with Frozen is that it was virtually gutted of all things Faerie.

I don't mean that it was hardly recognizable from its inspiration, Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, although it was that.  I mean the magic was all but absent.

Oh, there was magic, as in the powers of Princess Elsa to make ice and snow from the touch of her fingertips.  But there was an utter lack of the magic of Faerie; the sense of and cautious reverence for the Otherworld; of danger from an almost-but-not-quite pernicious sentience; of the fickle, and uninterested, yet inexplicably connected existence just beyond the reach of of our own.  There was no alarm at Elsa's powers or inkling that something deeper was going on in relation to them (the curse of a slighted fairy, or the residual trait of an ancestor's mingling with gods); and even the characters' fear of Elsa was not found in the nature and source of the powers but in her potential to do damage with them.  After the ball scene when the new queen's secret is revealed, Anna doesn't even pause to wonder at this astounding development; it's all par for the course.  "So that's why she's shut me out all these years."  O-kay.

Granted, in traditional fairy tales, fantastic events are often presented without any commentary on their fantasticness.  But the fairy tales never mean to make the fantastical belong to the mortal.  There is always an explanation of sorts, even if that explanation shuts out further investigation, like the lid of box snapping shut on a hand.  "She was actually a faerie changeling in disguise."  That's it, that's all that's needed.  A recognition of the Other, of some always-and-ought-to-be unknown.

Even the trolls are pared down to their lowest common denominator, emptying them of all the mystery and danger of the otherfolk and making them mere comical, cartoonish creatures.

Finally, the glass shard in the heart* loses its potency.  Rather than darkening the sight of Anna,** the shard in the eye (generalized to "head" in the movie) only knocks her unconscious and turns white a strand of her hair.  All her memories have to be erased so she forgets her sister's gift-curse and doesn't question Elsa's separation from her.  But that is a secondary, and not a direct, result of the ice shard.  The second ice shard slowly freezes Anna's body but leaves her heart untainted.  What kind of congress with Faerie only touches the outside of a person, only his physical existence; leaves his perception of the world unshaken?

When Anna finally reaches the palace of her ice queen sister, it is opposite of what little Gerda finds when she arrives at the sheer and terrible fortress of the Snow Queen.  Anna finds only a very human girl, with very human hurts and emotions and fears, and the rest of the palace empty.  But Gerda finds the Snow Queen absent--as her nature, one might say, is a great, gaping absence--and dear Kai with his soul half-killed, working away mechanically at a puzzle made of shards of ice, trying, yet ever failing, to form the word eternity.  Anna's act of sacrificial love for her sister Elsa breaks the spell, as one would expect.  When Elsa feels and knows her sister's love for her, her frigid emotional walls falter and crumble.  It is a self-administered cure.  But when Gerda finds poor Kai enslaved to logic--the ice-cold logic of the mind, of science, of nature, and of seasons--her shed tears melt his heart and wash loose the shards of glass.

source

For Faerie is vast and fierce, and we often tremble before it and believe ourselves helpless.  But in this, the heroes and heroines of fairy tales prove us mistaken.  We are not helpess.  Faerie is wild but not immune to obeisance--for those with stout hearts and stubborn wills, though the winter seem endless, and the journey long.




*  changed from glass to ice in the movie, so as to remove the uncomfortable and politically incorrect hell-mirror-falling-from-heaven scenario
**  who is the combination of Kai and Gerda from Anderson, though Elsa, the Snow Queen figure, has bits of Kai in her as well

Posts of Christmas Past

I've been stretched a bit thin in real life this year, and except for the Harry Potter Project, to which I made a commitment and to which certain well-disciplined project partners/friends keep me accountable, there's not been much new material on the blog since the summer.  It's a real pity to me and something I intend to improve in the new year.

In the meantime, I thought I'd gather together all the Christmas and wintery posts and link them--some of them you may have forgotten in a year's time or never read them, if you're new to SSiG.  Seasons each have their own distinctive magic, and the winter season's is sharp and clear.  A perfect time for internal scrutinizing and looking back on things in the ice-blue distance.

I wrote on the theme of winter dreaming last night:

. . . I do dream of white Christmases, and dreaming is memory--at least, they must come from the same place in the soul.  And even though I now live in a sub-tropic clime, I'm a child of Midwestern winters, and the hard, warm snow that fell on flat, dry grass, lending its porcelain silence to a drab and weary backdrop. 

I remember waking in the dark of early morning, breath held.  Even if no word came from the television that school was canceled due to snow-blocked roads, I still thrilled to step out into the white-and-black world.  Snow makes stars sharper, somehow.  I'd bundle up and go out early to wait on the corner of the street.  My feet were the first imprint; it was surreal, like crossing finest sand on a beach no human soul had touched on another planet.  Everything was suddenly closer, the world made smaller; you know, sharper, like when you twist your camera lens and everything comes into focus, so that you can see each tiny grain of glass.   As if the light reflected drew the sky down to gaze at her own reflection.   I stood there for ten, fifteen--twenty minutes well before I had to; before the other children--noisy, shoving and joking, oblivious--came out to wait with me; before the squat bus lumbered over the road toward us, and broke my shimmering bubble of infinite yet self-contained existence. 

I mean, there's more than one reason it's called a snowglobe.

That's a taste of where I write from when I write about this lightless season; though it really doesn't lack light of all.

On the Snow Queen, Part I

On the Snow Queen, Part II

Merry, Magic Christmas

Father Christmas as Fairy Tale

On the Snow Queen, Part III

Snow Apple

Enjoy.  And thanks for sticking with me.

What are some of your favorite thoughts on winter?

On The Snow Queen, Part 3

At the beginning of Book 3 of The Snow Queen, little Kai is gone and taken for dead.  The grown-ups in Gerda's life tell her that Kai is no longer living, and she believes what they say about him.

But something happens to break winter's spell.  Spring.  And spring brings sunshine, and with sunshine comes hope.

"Kay is dead and gone," said little Gerda. 

"I don't believe it," said the sunshine. 

"He is dead and gone," she said to the swallows. 

"We don't believe it," said the swallows, and at last little Gerda did not believe it either.

How promising must have been the return of the sunshine in the old world, especially in the far northern regions.  After the winter solstice, the days lengthened, promising an end to the hard, bleak winter.

So Gerda goes to the river, the place where Kai is supposed to have drowned, and throws her little red shoes into it in hopes that the river will return Kai.

Red is the color of blood, of sacrifice.  Gerda offers up nothing less when she throws her shoes, "her most cherished possessions," into the river in exchange for Kai.

Thinking she has not thrown her shoes far enough, Gerda climbs into a boat and drifts away through spring into summer.

Here, another season spirit like the Snow Queen is encountered:  "the old woman was learned in magic art, but she was not a bad witch, she only cast spells over people for a little amusement, and she wanted to keep Gerda."  Like her winter sister, the summer witch appears to act as a force of nature, not out of maliciousness.  She would keep the child Gerda in the drowsy forgetfulness of eternal summer.

The cherries that bring on Gerda's forgetfulness juxtapose with the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the biblical Paradise.  But Gerda is not to be tempted with a natural Eden when she has the supernatural gift of love and true friendship.

Eleanor Vere Boyle

So the old witch causes Gerda to forget Kai and banishes the roses--those symbols of eternity and friendship that would remind Gerda of her love for Kai--but forgets to hide the roses painted on her hat.  "This is the consequence of being absent-minded."  Gerda remembers, and when her tears fall, the roses are released from underground.  She asks them,

"Do you think [Kay] is dead and gone?" 

"He is not dead," said the roses.  "For we have been down underground, you know, and all the dead people are there, but Kay is not among them."

Like the sparrows and the sunshine, the roses speak the truth.

But they also speak to resurrection.  Gerda's suffering, her tears, have brought them out of the ground.  Like angelic messengers, they announce that the one she seeks is not dead but living.  "Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here" (Luke 24:5-6).

Then she goes to ask the other flowers if they have seen little Kai.  But the flowers, as are so many others we encounter in life, are concerned only with themselves and their own dreams and stories.  So little Gerda escapes out of the garden into the wide world, where it is no longer summer but autumn.

On The Snow Queen, Part 2

Snowflakes and Roses

. . . Kay said, "Oh, something struck my heart, and I have got something in my eye!" 

The little girl put her arms round his neck, he blinked his eye, there was nothing to be seen. 

"I believe it is gone," he said, but it was not gone.  It was one of those very grains of glass from the mirror, the magic mirror.  You remember that horrid mirror, in which all good and great things reflected in it became small and mean, while the bad things were magnified, and every flaw became very apparent. 

Poor Kay! a grain of it had gone straight to his heart, and would soon turn it to a lump of ice.

In Story Two of The Snow Queen, the mirror shards act as stepping stones connecting the mischief of the magic mirror to the body of the tale and disclosing why the mirror is significant to the characters.

But the mirror shards that lodge into into Kai's heart and eye don't appear to have any effect on the plot, other than to make Kai cruel to Gerda.  Unless perhaps, they have some bearing on Kai's going out to sled with the boys in the square, where he is picked up by the Snow Queen.  Then the Snow Queen's kiss finishes the process of turning his heart into a lump of ice, the process started by the mirror shard.

Arthur Rackham

Though the devil's mirror and the Snow Queen are not direct accomplices, their methods are similar.  The glass shards make Kai blind to the living beauty of the roses and only able to appreciate the inorganic geometry of the snowflakes.

"Do you see how cleverly they are made," said Kay.  "Much more interesting than looking at real flowers, and there is not a single flaw in them, they are perfect, if only they would not melt."

This is the doing of the magic mirror shard.  But it couldn't have been more appropriate if the Snow Queen had contrived it herself.

The bitter winter season must have been a harsh reality for Scandinavians and other northern Europeans, hence the ancient emphasis on the winter solstice and pre-Christian traditions of looking forward to the end of darkness.  For people before our modern age, summer was an essential to life, a time of year without which they would not have the means to survive.

No doubt related to pagan winter deities, the Snow Queen acts as an embodiment of the winter season--not necessarily evil in intention but ruthless in execution.  Nature is indifferent and, short of miracle, follows only those laws that have been set out for it.  So the Snow Queen is beautiful and meticulous:

She was delicately lovely, but all ice, glittering, dazzling ice.  Still she was alive, her eyes shone like two bright stars, but there was no rest or peace in them.

So reason, science, and logic without imagination and emotion are utilitarian but barren as ice.

[Read Part 1 here.]

Artist Spotlight

Emma SanCartier

We haven't spotlighted a fairy tale artist in several months, so here is some lighthearted relief via the whimsical, folksy illustrations of Emma SanCartier.

6 swans

You could put a lot of things into the category of "folksy," but when I look at her prints, I think of medieval wood stamping with a pleasant, unique mix of Maurice Sendak.

the snow queen

They are highly imaginative and superbly colorful, with luscious sweeps of the watercolor brush and veils of blues and oranges overlapping.  She also uses patterns reminiscent of native textiles.

gerda takes flight

And infuses the old tales with a little attitude.

little red riding hood

rapunzel takes action

Support Ms. SanCartier and snag some cool Christmas presents on her etsy shop.

As always, if you or someone you know is a budding fairy tale writer or artist, Spinning Straw into Gold wants to spotlight them!

On "The Snow Queen," Part 1

Shards of Glass

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson is my favorite, right up there with Rumpelstiltskin.

This unusually long fairy tale grasps hold of the imagination with something inherently wondrous and magical--snow--as well as a vast northern landscape, a turn of seasons, a queen of merciless nature, and a brave and strong little girl determined to find her best childhood friend.

source

One might be confused, then, when The Snow Queen begins with a tale that seems to have little to do with what the title suggests.

The "First Story"* tells of a "real demon," who takes delight in wickedness and creates a mirror in which all good things it reflects are distorted.  He and his fellow demons, in their pride, decide to carry the mirror up to heaven, to mock even the angels, but the mirror is far too heavy for them.  It slips and falls to earth, shattering into infinitesimal pieces that lodge into the hearts and eyes of human beings.

Some of the fragments were so big that they were used for window panes, but it was not advisable to look at one's friends through these panes.  Other bits were made into spectacles, and it was a bad business when people put on these spectacles meaning to be just.

On The Snow Queen annotations of the web's number one fairy tale resource, SurLaLune, Francesca Matteoni provides interested readers with some context:

The looking-glass is a recurrent symbol in fairy-tales, see for example Snow White.  In this specific case, as Lederer notes, the reflecting surface can represent the illusion of the senses in which the reality of the soul is misshaped.  A similar concept is traceable in the Gnostic doctrines, according to which God was not responsible for the creation of the world: the earthly world was in fact the result of a separation from the realm of the spirit, and of the illusory work of an evil demiurge (Lederer 1986, 6-7).

This is very interesting, especially, as Ms. Matteoni mentions, because mirrors appear so frequently in fairy tales.

When I first read about the distortion-mirror, however, it didn't seem to me that the mirror revealed the untrustworthiness of the five senses.  Rather, I thought this was an ice-clear commentary by the author about the taint of the fallen human soul.

Nika Goltz

Readers of Dante and Milton, or even those passingly familiar with the western classics, might recognize the shattering mirror, the demons' pride and their fruitless revolt against heaven, as a "mirror-image" of the Fall.  The bits of glass that scatter to earth and that later contaminate little Kai are like the residual effects of that fall, be it original sin, concupiscence, or what have you.

It's not literally Kai's eyes that are the distorting instrument, but the illusory mirror which transforms the physical things--things that are real and in the temporal world, like the children's roses--into ugliness.

Perhaps Anderson meant the mirror as commentary on the politics of his day, perhaps of people that he knew, but more than that, of human nature itself, of people who, for whatever reason--be it a grudge, bigotry, jealousy, or a sense of entitlement--view their fellow human beings through a distorted lens.

Everyone probably knows one or two of these people.  Maybe they are the kind of people whose mouths are always ready with complaints, who don't know how to take a compliment and are quick to judge and mistrust, or insist that "all the best people [become] hideous, or else they [are] upside down and [have] no bodies."

At any rate, it prepares readers for little Gerda's redemption-esque quest to restore Kai to innocence and safety.

What were your thoughts, if any, on the introduction to this classic Anderson tale?  Am I wrong about the symbolic role the mirror plays in the First Story?




*  I quote from the 1988 edition of Anderson's Fairy Tales by Children's Classics, which uses a translations from the first quarter of the twentieth century.