The Fairy Tale of the King

Summary: A king is worshiped by everyone around him. For example, if he laughed, his royal court laughed or if he cried his royal court cried. Because of this the King grew bored and went in search of the truth. Was he really powerful and would people still mimic him if he took of his royal garments? The King then disguises himself and found that people laugh at him and not with him... he even gets kicked. In searching for truth, he finds a young woman who has lost her parents and bridegroom due to high tax debts commanded by the king. He consoles her and is seized by love for her, and she for him. She becomes Queen and he finds a new realm, "The realm of Love". The tale states it is a "fairy tale ream in which even fish mate in the air."

This can be called a fairytale mainly because of the romance. There are other fairy tale elements as well, like "Once upon a time", the establishment of a king in general, and disguise. At the heart of the fairy tale element is romance. I say this because like so many other stories we know, the love happens like magic. Unlike Disney film adaptions that build up to the eventual love scene, most written fairy tales do not mention a possible romantic spark until you read to a certain page number and conveniently the maiden stumbles across a handsome young man. One paragraph (or less) and they are married. The truth of life that the king went on a search for is somehow love. And just like that she becomes Queen. Sounds like a fairytale to me.

Cinderella Continued, or the Rat and the Six Lizards

Cinderella Continued is the story of what happens to the rat and six lizards that Cinderella's fairy godmother turned into the coachman and footmen. They are allowed to stay in their transformed states even after the clock strikes midnight. The rat, who was transformed into the coachman, decides that he will take charge of the footmen and they will become highwaymen.

They spend years amassing a fortune and then retire. The rat becomes obsessed with learning and buys many books to read. He also compiled many works himself. He also educates the six former lizards in various arts and they all are successful. After awhile the rat and four of the lizards die leaving only two of the band alive. These two fail to live within their means and are forced to once again steal to make their way. They wind up stealing a pair of Cinderella's slippers and one takes all the blame and is killed. The other does not live much longer himself.

The story is a fairy tale for a couple of reasons. There are elements of magic and a surprising ending. The whole story is based on the fact that the story of Cinderella occurred and the fairy godmother did in fact change the animals into men. This is obviously a magical feat. Also, the fact that the animals have human equivalent intelligence is unrealistic and so fairytale-esque in that it personifies the personalities of the transformed coachman and footmen.

Also, at the end of the tale, the reader is told that the fuzzy slippers taken by the two footmen are now on display at a museum in Pittsburgh and are being called pin trays. This is offering a fantastical explanation for the actual objects at the museum.

The Fairy Tale of the King... and other things.

Georg Kaiser presents a story of a king who is so well loved, that his every action is mirrored by the whole of his court. One day the king begins to question his power, and wonders if perhaps he is not all powerful himself, but rather his power is merely an illusion because of his court. He therefore leaves his palace and journeys among the common folk, to see if they respect him without his court surrounding him. Unsurprisingly, people really don't care too much about this random dude who has no robes, gold, or court followers. However, he does meet a beautiful young woman, whose family has just been put to death, on order of the king, for not paying their taxes. He consoles the young woman, they fall in love, and then decide to found a new kingdom, one based on love.

Up to this point, the tale is fairly mundane. It's horribly cliche and predictable, but nonetheless does present a moral. Up until the very last sentence that is. "With her as queen, he decided to found a new realm, the realm of Love, a fairy tale realm in which even fish were seen to mate in the air." Now really, I can't even think of a valid quizzical response to that that doesn't include one or two vulgarities at the very least. ~ la la la ~ Fairy tale of a king learning a lesson that all of us should learn ~ la la la ~ fairy tale fish having sex in mid-air.

I can't even come up with a good BS reasoning for this. Sure it's something fantastical to denote the realm as fairy-tale like, but why not talk about galloping unicorns, or dancing pixies. Pretty much anything but the copulation of fish in mid-air. Maybe Kaiser was going for some sort of satirical commentary on the nature of romantic literature. Maybe he honestly though that fish mating in mid-air was a valid fairy tale occurrence that audiences would enjoy. Hell, maybe the guy who translated it to English was just having a bad day and decided to take it out on this poor Georg Kaiser dude. Your guess is clearly as good as mine. Or Georg Kaiser's. Or his translator.

Rumpelstiltskin by Rosemarie Künzler

The version of Rumpelstiltskin that I read is by Rosemarie Künzler whom has published many poems, stories and children books. It is about a miller who proudly talks about his daughter and assures everyone that she can spin straw into gold. As a result, a King takes the girl to a room and tells her that she must spin the straw in the room to gold by the next morning or she will die. As the girl began to cry because she can't really turn the straw into gold, Rumpelstiltskin appears and makes a deal with her. He says that she has to give him something and he will turn the straw into gold. The king sees the gold and becomes greedy. He takes her to a bigger room with the same ultimatum. Rumpel makes the same deal with her and spins the straw into gold. The next day, the king takes the daughter to an even bigger room and says that if she spins the straw into gold again then he will marry her. Rumpel appears again but the girl has nothing so Rumpel wants the the daughters first born after she has married the king. The daughter says she didn't want to marry him in the first place. Rumpel gets mad because he doesn't get what he wants, swears the he will never spin again because he spun in vain and stamps his foot so hard that it creates a crack in the ground that opens the door and frees the girl. This is an obvious fairy tale because Rumpel shows up without being called or anything and acts as the daughter's fairy god-mother. Rumpel is able to create gold out of straw which is an attribute of a fairy tale and the girl is freed quite easily with no harm done to her. I feel the moral of the story is not to always expect to get what you want in turn after you've willingly helped somebody.

The Story of the Fairy Tale in "The Story of the Fairy Tale"

"The Story of the Fairy Tale" is about five men who set out to find Truth, returning with ideas like Science, Theology, Love, Gold, and Wine. No one can agree on who is right, and they fight until a girl shows them truth: an indistinguishable figure with soft, bird-like wings. The creature tells them he is truth, and the people proclaim, "It's a Fairy Tale." The men then continue their fighting, but some of the people stay in the meadow with the Fairy Tale.

This story was written in 1905 by Carl Edward, a danish social novelist who manipulated fairy tales to symbolically include his political and social messages. Interestingly, he was greatly influenced by social Darwinism, shown in this tale by the battle of the seekers of the Truth in which the little girl proves to have won "the survival of the fittest."

Like a fairy tale, the story begins with "Once upon a time" with men sent out on a quest ("in search of Truth"). Like a fairy tale, the characters are nameless ("wise men," "little girl"), and the location is extremely non-specific ("one in this direction and one in that"). True to its title, the tale explains what constitutes a fairy tale in the characterization of one. This fairy tale is of indistinguishable gender, age, and explanation. The fairy tale is the truth for the individual, whatever one takes from its indistinguishable nature defines personal truth. The ones who stay with the Fairy Tale are the believers, here predominantly women and children (those most likely to believe).

The role of magic in The Oriental Saint

In "A wondrous Oriental tale of a naked Saint", by Wilhelm Wackenroder magic takes on the role of a natural event. In romantic style, Wackenroder highlights an ideal of nature surrounding the remote cave of saint. He described how the land around the saint changed, as if by a magical transformation, into the setting where the tortured genius could be released from his terrible duty turning the wheel of time. In effect, this is the same as any other fairy tale: a magical transformation, helped along by the actions of supernatural or magical beings, enable the change of the main character. The only major difference is that in this case the magic is nature, and the 'supernatural beings' are two young lovers engaged in a song so magical that it releases the saint from his torture.

This really emphasizes the theory of the romantic era that nature is idealized. Wackenroder, in this tale, is making nature into all the magic that supernatural beings normally create. The idealization of young love and all things natural is enough power to release the tortured soul of the saint.

Freedom

After reading "A Wondrous Oriental Tale of a Naked Saint" by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, I have come to the conclusion that magic exists only in the story as a sort of bridge to freedom. The saint is stuck in a roll of winding the wheel of time. He sits and critiques the pilgrims that he observes as they visit with a disdain. He does so because he views the world differently than them. Magic comes into play when one night when "the homes of the people were transformed into the dark shapes of boulders and dusky supernatural palaces." He says from that point "the people, no longer blinded by sunlight, lived with their eyes fixed on the firmament, and their souls were mirrored beautifully in the heavenly glow of the moonlight night. The magic freed the people to see what they could not see before when they were blinded by the light. They were freed to add additional perspective to the world they once knew. This too goes with the saint. After the people sing the song that magically releases the saint from being imprisoned in his job, and his imprisoned human form. He goes from being full of disdain to a grander feeling of happiness related to freedom. Magic serves to open people's eyes to a new world that they either did not pay attention to at first or never really knew.

Magic in the Philosopher's Stone

In the Philosopher's stone magic is regarded in different ways by different people. The King clearly is in awe of magic since he is looking for the Philosopher's stone which will enable him to have all the gold he desires. However there are others that "regarded magic with disdain." It could be said that they had the right idea since his pursuit of magic caused the King such grief throughout the story. However, it does all work out in the end.

First, the King gets swindled by scores of people who know how gullible he is. They offer him outrageous ways of getting the stone and wind up taking his money and running. Then a man comes who the King is sure is the real deal. He believes he is friends with this man and spends all sorts of money to make sure the man has all that he desires. Then when the man tells the King that he only needs to provide a few hundred precious gems to make the stone the King rapidly agrees and the man ends up leaving with all of the gems.

Magic strikes the King again when a man gives him a stone and tells him to rub it on his chest. Believing it to be the Philosopher's stone the King does and is then turned into a donkey. While in donkey form the King sees the error of trying to get the stone and then eventually is changed into a peasant man and falls in love with his former wife. When given the option to be the King again he says no because he now sees what a terrible life he had. So in the end, magic has made him happy which ties in with most fairy tales with a magical element.

Allow Me, If You Will, the Express Opportunity to Establish the Validity of My Tale So that You Will Not Overlook It as Inauthentic and Therefore Un-

worthy of Your Time Since All Credibility Originates in the Source of the Work which I Feel Compelled to Defend for Your Sake Lest You Refuse to Benefit from the All-Important Message for which this Tale Is the Vehicle…
A Comedy

(My apologies for part of the title getting cut off... Aparently there is some sort of a word limit--note to self or any aspiring bloggers: 150 characters--to this thing... Who knew? Guess they don't deal in Academic Writing with much frequency...
But now that that nasy business has been settled let us embark on the actual purpose of this particular presentation, the project of the article in question)

One interesting thing to note about literary fairytales, depending in part how you define the genre, is the inexorable lengths that the authors go to in efforts to establish the credibility of the source and the authenticity of the tale(s). Barring, for the sake of argument, such examples as Giambattista Basile's The Pentameron—wherein the individual stories are presented within the structure of a frame story that creates the "authentic" storytellers as the "sources" of the individual tales so as to legitimize the tales presented—and the Grimm brothers' versions of tales—where, in the interest of presenting themselves as authentic sources for fairytales catalogued with great detail their own sources while simultaneously partaking in certain actions as changing the style and presentation of the tale (by their own hands) for the sake of making them seem much more rustic and therefore credible—literary fairytales often tend towards an incomprehensible drive to prove their non-existent pedigree even when it is clearly the case that no such pedigree exists (the reason it becomes necessary, for the purpose of this explication, to ignore the types of examples above described).

Both "The Philosopher's Stone" and "A Wondrous Tale of a Naked Saint" present cases for their own authenticity and significance—though notably by different means which link in turn to their particular and exact projects in the genre. Because I feel like it, I am going to start by discussing the case of Wieland. I am going to pretend that this is due to the chronological perspective, which is in faith the order of Zipes' arrangement and therefore also presumably the order in which I read them, but is actually because I know that it is better form in writing (for the sake of seeming coherent and structured to and of elucidating and simplifying for the reader by means of a much easier style to follow which in turn will increase my reputation with said reader increasing, in turn, my credibility as well—or at least not harming either, which would be a likely outcome of using inconsistent ordering of the same subjects) and when I started writing the paragraph I already wrote "Both 'The'" before referencing the text to determine recall the precise titles of the two tales and it would have been too much effort for me to have deleted that extent of my progress or to reorder them by the time I actually explained that I was going to discus them individually. In Wieland's case, the tale begins by referencing, in historical form, the recounting of the lives of Tristan and Isolde, a well-known detail in the tapestry of tales—and also a tale which, itself, claims to be historical—beyond mere name-dropping to the point of presenting a thorough knowledge of the history—accurate or otherwise—in depicting some of the more a-contextual details, as the alternate name of the fair Isolde. Of course, this lends itself well to his own period and style of writing, in the mode of Enlightenment, since it presents a very rational and precise type of account of the tale's pedigree. Simultaneously—and also in the name of the Enlightenment—he undermines his own façade in the purposeful insertion of inaccuracies to the end of acknowledging and advertising to the reader that the tale, though it fits keenly into a tradition, is by no means a truth, most likely because of the irrationality that is presented in it (of magic and transformation).

Because I really don't feel inclined to write any more on the topic right now, I am strongly tempted to just give up and call it quits right now without even attempting to discus the way in which Wackenroder employs similar techniques to a different ends, but I do not want to take all of the extra energy necessary to delete and rework the first couple of lines in the preceding paragraph. Of course, I could always simply request of you, the reader, a slight favor, that you might indulge me by pretending that I did discus and reveal to you this truth since it should be evident when you read the text, but then I am reminded that you cannot be trusted in such an event, so I cannot achieve my desire. I am relegated to following through on my promises and actually answering the expression of Wackenroder's credibility. The credibility comes, in this case, from its "foreignness" since, by Wackenroder's time, the Enlightenment had made great strides in eliminating any sense of mysticism in Germany—to which Romanticism was the direct answer—and the Middle or Far East, source of the One Thousand Nights and A Night and numerous other tales that would just have been getting published and translated, was considered to be a place where magic was still believed in—and perhaps even possible. By linking to that tradition, the newness and inconsistencies with the European folktale genre would not be taken into question, and because the "Orient" was considered to be a place engulfed in mysticism, the absurd tale secures more credibility than if it were to be successfully accounted for as a traditional German folktale.

I am going to sleep now.