Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

Why fairy tales? She was bitten by that bug early, having devoured the Andrew Lang color fairy books as an impressionable girl.

It is why, when asked to give the Andrew Lang lecture in 2012, (past lecturers had included J. R. R. Tolkien, who gave the “On Fairie-Stories” lecture, as well as John Buchan!) she hesitated until told that—as the twenty-second lecturer since 1927, she would be the first woman to do so. At that point she signed on. They had to bring in about a hundred more seats as the hall filled up.

One of the things Jane Yolen enjoys doing is retelling a familiar story from the point of view of an unfamiliar narrator, and “The Spindle’s Tale” is no exception. Here an innocent is coerced into doing an evil deed, and pays the price instead of the powerful enchanter.

One might wish to ask if this is meant as a political fable, but Yolen always says, “I tell the story. I leave commentary and exegesis to academics and critics. And if you think I am being disingenuous, then you don’t know me very well! As I wrote at the end of a recent poem: ‘After the soldiers leave the field/Truth stays on, under its own banner.’ ”

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The Spinning Wheel’s Tale ?





Jane Yolen


I worked all my life. Indeed, I worked for every hand that touched me: spinning a thread, spinning a tale, spinning a life. Yet all I am remembered for in this kingdom is the one death that was spun of a witch’s lies.

Blame her, not me, for the hundred years of devastation, the castle waiting while sleep stole breath after breath. Blame her for hedges run riot while gardeners dozed. Blame her for the loss of revenues, avenues, a major highway becoming a byway, a byway a path.

But do not blame me. I only spun what I was held to, did what I was told.

I was always a poor woman’s right hand, the small business base, not something fit for palaces. Yet here I was brought, set into curse and tale. We who are the workers have no say in the production. It is an old story, but a true one.

I remember the acorn, the sprout, the single green leaf. But that never features in this tale. The story begins with spinning, spinning the wheel, spinning the curse, spinning the lies that lie at the heart of a mouth, a castle, a hedge.

And of course it all begins with a witch.

Let us call her Malara. Or Maleficient. Or Maladroit. It is all the same. She was jealous, of course, of her twelve sisters, of her position ? 53 ?

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in the middle of their pack. Not the prettiest, not the fairest, not the smartest, not the sweetest, not the eldest, not the youngest. All those get special mention in any recounting. She was, so she liked to say, the median, the middle, the muddle, and the mess.

Well at least in this she was honest, if in nothing else.

Everything Malara put her hand to was a failure. A wish for a woman’s fecundity produced a litter of babes too small and too early to live, and a blasted womb thereafter. A wish for a garden to produce led straight to a proliferation of weeds the likes of which had never been known in the land. A wish for the early marriage of a prince turned into an early funeral as well. She did not have a good head for wishing.

But oh, how Malara could curse.

She could cause the dead to rise, pennies on their eyes, and a death rattle in their mouths that went zero to the bone.

She could curse a man to impotence, a cuckold to impudence.

She could curse a purse to poverty, a poet to prosody, a singer to a sore throat, and a hangman to his own noose. She could curse a king to catastrophe, a princess to catatonia. She was herself the queen of curses.

No wonder she ceased to be invited to royal births, royal christenings, royal engagements, royal weddings. Even funerals were forbidden to her.

She was left with nothing—nothing to do, nothing to favor—and that led to her to having everything to do with what happened ever after.