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Tempest Hart (Wilds of Eldraine No. 238, Illus. Aldo Dominguez)

I don't actually have to say much about the illustration here - I just like the composition, the mood, and the overall style. But I want to use it as a jumping-off point to talk about Wilds of Eldraine for a bit.

Wilds of Eldraine, released earlier this year, was both a treat and a bit of a letdown for me. Leading up to the set's release, I was excited about getting to see the weirdness of the Wilds. Once the full spoiler was released, I was a bit disappointed that so much space was given to merely referencing traditional fairy tales, and that the set featured so many at once that there wasn't enough space to properly flesh out most locations. As a result, the set as a whole feels a bit scatterbrained, held together by the references to its source material rather than internal consistency or worldbuilding.

However, the other day I found a collection of concept art for Wilds of Eldraine over on the website of the Magic Multiverse Project, and looking at the concepts changed my mind a bit. As is probably the case with every Magic set, there's a lot more work done behind the scenes, and now that blocks are gone, it's probably just really hard to give everything the space it deserves.

Out of all the concepts, the ones which caught my attention the most were those for the "Kingdom of Storms." Apparently there's just not one "Giant's Castle in the Sky" where Beluna and some other storm giants reside, but a whole civilization in the skies above Eldraine. Its built on magical clouds, and the beanstalks (Everstalks) are the only access points from the surface.

Even just a look at the single concept illustration above gives you an idea how there could easily a whole set (or even block) built around a conflict between Eldraine's land dwellers and the storm giants. When you only got one set to work with, there's simply not enough room for exploration.

But paradoxically, at the same time the storm giants and other cloud dwellers are almost too present in Wilds of Eldraine. The same is true for Sweettooth Village or the Redtooth Elves. For what little role they play in the story, they show up on way too many cards.

For me, Wilds of Eldraine is an example of how building a set around the ten color pairs as draft archetypes can "gimp" worldbuilding and visual storytelling a bit. I kind of wish Wizards would have put an even stronger focus on the main focus of the set - the Wicked Slumber (Sleeping Beauty) and maybe the other two witches (Ice Queen and Little Red Riding Hood analogues). That would have been more than enough for one set, and things like Sweettooth or the Realm of the Storm Giants could have been merely teased here and there and saved as material for our next visit.

I think part of the reason it wasn't done this way was because of marketing concerns. While original Eldraine was successful, Wizards wasn't confident enough that focusing on one main fairy tale would be enough to garner enough "resonance," so they decided to stuff Wilds of Eldraine to the brim with references. But well ... I guess those kind of things just happen when you're under pressure to sell as much product as possible.

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Schloss Ahrensburg, Ahrensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

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Madame d'Aulnoy's Golden Bough? Gothic horror? That's... that's a choice.

I guess it is due to the medievalism. It is considered one of the highlights of d'Aulnoy's works compared to other fairytales of the time, and it wasn't just part of her style but also of her personal taste and life. Madame d'Aulnoy was entranced with the medieval aesthetic and medieval elements in general, which was called "Gothic" at the time, because that's the thing of the "Gothic", basically it was just an old-timey word for "medieval". And "The Golden Bough" is considered to be one of the most "medieval" of madame d'Aulnoy's fairytales, due to the use of details like enluminated scriptures and stained glass present in the old, abandoned part of a castle - and things of the sort.

Usually when I click on one of those "dark fairytale" videos I DO NOT expect to hear about one of the literary fairytales of France - and yet here we are! What a surprise it was to discover one right in this video.

Mind you, it makes sense why this story would be known by English speakers, as it is present in Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy Book under the title "Fairer-than-a-Fairy". However do not make any mistake, this fairytale is part of the "century of fairytales" of France - it is a literary fairytale called "Le Prince Arc-en-Ciel", The Rainbow Prince. Now when you check the English Wikipedia you'll see the fairytale is attributed to the Chevalier de Mailly, which would make it one of the "first generation French literary fairytales". But... this is a mistake?

Actually The Rainbow Prince/Fairer-than-a-Fairy is an anonymous fairytale, whose author hasn't been clearly identified yet. It appears in several compilations and collections of literary fairytales in the 18th century - and was preserved in Le Cabinet des Fées - but no author was recorded. Its first apparition was in 1718, which would place it into the "second generation" literary fairytales of France, and by 1718 to my knowledge Mailly wasn't writing fairytales anymore... But at the same time it makes sense he would be assumed to be the author of this fairytale as - like the video points out - there are strong parallels to the Vestals of Ancient Rome AND de Mailly actually wrote a treaty about the life, cult and customs of the Vestals in 1701.

Something not talked about in the video is also the tie of the wicked fairy, "Lagrée", to the Graeae of Ancient Greece, the one-eyed one-toothed hags Perseus has to deal with. It isn't just a tie through the "one eye one tooth and old hag" visual, but also with the fairy's very name. "Lagrée" is actually "La Grée", "The Graeae", because in French the Graeae are called Les Grées. So she is a HUGE reference to the Greek myth.

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Lea Seydoux in La Belle et la Bête (2014)

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Linderhof Palace, Ettal, Bavaria, Germany

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Speaking of the movie "The Brothers Grimm".

My disturbed little mind as a kid was satisfied with all the "snatchings" of the girl we saw on screen... Except for the Hansel and Gretel one. I remember how I was disappointed because it felt quite flat and didn't lean enough into the fairytale it was referencing. I mean, given the rest of the epic supernatural abnormalities I was expecting something a bit more uncanny.

But I rewatched this specific scene recently and I realized I could head-canon it as more interesting than it is. That or maybe I stumbled upon one of the more subtle references Gilliam wanted to make and the Weinsteins opposed in favor of more blunt, every-day fairytales who knows...

The Greta girl in the movie gets "snatched" by the Huntsman when her shawl is dragged away by a supernatural "wind". Only today can I see in there "The Goose-Girl" and the whole part of the "Blow the hat away". I remember how in variations of the story it is sometimes the handkerchief or the scarf of the girl itself that is blown away and that the boy has to retrieve.

On top of this we are dealing with magic performed by a princess who feels her realm and position has been snatched from her - AND she literaly uses a bewitched horse to get girls killed.

Honestly, if we agree that "The Goose-Girl" was one of the Grimms' fairytales used in the movie, it makes more sense of a lot of little details used here and there (but I am especially thinking about horse. That damned horse.)

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One more, by @heroisagirlsname

I may be misremembering but I think T Kingfisher has a novella called Boar Apples in one of her short story collections where I *think* the Queen is Snow's biological mother. And also instead of dwarves, SW gets adopted by a herd of wild boars

Are there any Snow White adaptations where the evil queen is the biological mother? I’ve always wanted to live in the timeline where the Grimms didn’t change it…

Its also interesting when you compare it to Hansel and Gretel adaptations, where you’re equally likely to get an evil mother or stepmother, while in Snow White adaptations the queen is almost exclusively the stepmother

Well... They are quite rare indeed - despite the tendency to "grimmify" the story back into its literal "Grimm state", people rarely jump as far as to make the Evil Queen's Snow-White mother... Right now, on the top of my head, I can only think of two cases where the evil queen is the biological mother.

One is the novel by Tanith Lee "White as Snow", and the other is actually a little known French movie. It was part of those Arte-Flach collaborations I talked previously here, "Miroir mon amour" by Siegrid Alnoy. In both the character was preserved as the actual mother of Snow-White... Though interestingly both are not so much "traditional" retellings as mature alternate tellings filled with sex (Miroir mon amour is an artsy psycho-sexual sequel to the tale, White as snow is a dark alternate-history retelling filled with depraved sexuality of all kinds, a bit like A Song of Ice and Fire). I also suspect that the Japanese Vocaloid song (and its adaptations) "Genealogy of Red, Black and White" has the queen as Snow-White's mother - but I am not quite sure of this, while I listened to the song I never looked into the media that expanded the lore into an actual story...

I don't think of any other version right now... Maybe someone knows of one? But as far as I can tell, this element of the German Snow-White is indeed very neglected. Or when it is brought up, it is played around instead of directly adapted (such as in "Snow White: The Fairest of them All", where the queen transforms herself into Snow White's dead mother at one point)

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I wanted to share with you one folk tale that is very popular in Germany but wasn't collected by the brothers Grimm, nor by Ludwig Bechstein: "der dicke fette Pfannkuchen", the big fat pancake. It was first collected by the brothers Theodor and Carl Colshorn, in their "Märchen und Sagen aus Hannover", and it is basically "the gingerbread man", only with a pancake instead, and with the baked good accepting to be eaten by two orphaned children in the end.

there is also a version collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe, "Pannekaken", and one by Afanasyev, "Kolobok", which is a bit closer to the english tale.

Honestly? Those "Gingerbread Man" type of stories always weirded me out in the wrong way. They are... bizarre.

Mind you it doesn't help that as a kid this story was not part of my range of known fairytales... Outside of one case... The Gilliam-Weinstein collab "The Brothers Grimm". Yeah this movie. That was my introduction to this story-type.

There needs to be some digging though about the origin of this whole range of tales, though. Given what I found about story-types, usually when you have one little weird story that tends to pop out anywhere and seemingly has no reason or rhyme to it - when you look through it, it either has the most mundane or the most awesome explanation for why it exists in the first place.

Oh and speaking of The Brothers Grimm's movie, it reminds me...

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Self-reblogging here because of the fairytale motif

Spoilers alert for Discworld. None for TADC.

I can't help but compare and make weird world-crossovers between "Discworld" and "The Amazing Digital Circus".

When "Untitled" aired I was taking a look back at "The Wee Free Men". I already posted about it, but I will repost it here: Discworld's rendition of Fairyland made me immediately jump into the Digital Circus. Think about it... You have this all powerful entity with absolute control over this small pocket dimension, but is fundamentally un-creative, unable to grow up/learn/mature, and can only copy or steal things from the real world. This pocket dimension itself is only half-real and precisely lacks realisms in ways that pokes fun at the workings of early video games. And inside of it, people are from time to time locked into bubbles of dream-illusions that are warped, imperfect copy of specific plots you must play along until you find the exact method to "get out" and escape, to "end" the dream. And the result is people trying to cope in various failed ways (denial, madness) and the only way to manage to beat up and resist it all is basically having a deep session of self-therapy and self-discovery (Second to Fortieth Thoughts).

And now, "They all gets gun" is released as I was checking back "Witches Abroad". And once more, parallels. The fairy godmother hiding at the center of the fairytales being explicitely compared to the ringmaster of a circus having all the real power though you only see the big showy acts. The fairy godmother being obsessed with forcing people into specific paths, and imposing patterns onto human life, and trying to cut off everything human that doesn't fit a very specific frame of a given "story". The danger of "story magic" being described as confusing people because you don't know what is real and what isn't anymore, to the point that you don't know yourself who you are or what you did. The horror manifesting as people being imposed appearances that do not correspond to who they are, AND as beings having their spirit messed up, rewritten and broken into unfitting characters until they become suicidal and insane. The obviously antagonistic and evil power being convinced it is the good and heroic one, and torturing everybody in hope of making them happy.

It is so funny to see how you can so easily switch the computer-horror of TADC for the fae-horror of Discworld without changing much. And yet it makes sense... [Additional purposeless thoughts about it below]

It makes sense because Pratchett's own fantasy is very influenced by sci-fi (which he used to write parodies of before, and then wrote actual serious examples afterward) and actual science (which Pratchett worked with and knew quite a lot about, down to making the "Science of Discworld" collab). And despite being openly a fantasy work, it relies so much on sci-fi reference and scientific principles woven into the absurdist magic and the extravagant fantasy and the mythical lore that it joins back the old traition of "science-fantasy" that used to be so dominant. Heck, the big references and homages that built the Discworld early on were references to massive sci-fantasy works - The Dragonriders of Pern, Vance's Dying Earth, and so forth.

So it makes full sense that a huge half-absurdist half-rationalist fantasy parody written by a big nerd and geek for sci-fi television shows and first-generations video games would match with a big sci-fi parody created to reverse in Looney Tunes way classics of sci-fi horror and to delve into all the possibilities of digital horror and video-game uncanny in absurd way.

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If you didn't know, before Perrault wrote his "Contes", and before La Fontaine wrote his "Fables", La Fontaine wrote his own "Contes".

But they weren't marvelous fairy stories. They were saucy elegant sex jokes, in the true tradition of "contes" and tale-anthologies before Perrault and d'Aulnoy's fairytales became a thing.

Contes de La Fontaine illustrés par Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1770.

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@twstrsaheadcanons Adding this note by @empathiceyeroll :

There’s only two works that come to mind and I’m not sure if they count but they are the Sisters Grimm by Michael Buckley (I’m don’t remember if it was actually confirmed in the books, but the Evil Queen is notably referred as Snow White’s mother, not stepmother) and Rogue by Mona Awad (this is a stretch bc it’s not exactly a retelling, but you could say it is? Idk, I haven’t read it)

Are there any Snow White adaptations where the evil queen is the biological mother? I’ve always wanted to live in the timeline where the Grimms didn’t change it…

Its also interesting when you compare it to Hansel and Gretel adaptations, where you’re equally likely to get an evil mother or stepmother, while in Snow White adaptations the queen is almost exclusively the stepmother

Well... They are quite rare indeed - despite the tendency to "grimmify" the story back into its literal "Grimm state", people rarely jump as far as to make the Evil Queen's Snow-White mother... Right now, on the top of my head, I can only think of two cases where the evil queen is the biological mother.

One is the novel by Tanith Lee "White as Snow", and the other is actually a little known French movie. It was part of those Arte-Flach collaborations I talked previously here, "Miroir mon amour" by Siegrid Alnoy. In both the character was preserved as the actual mother of Snow-White... Though interestingly both are not so much "traditional" retellings as mature alternate tellings filled with sex (Miroir mon amour is an artsy psycho-sexual sequel to the tale, White as snow is a dark alternate-history retelling filled with depraved sexuality of all kinds, a bit like A Song of Ice and Fire). I also suspect that the Japanese Vocaloid song (and its adaptations) "Genealogy of Red, Black and White" has the queen as Snow-White's mother - but I am not quite sure of this, while I listened to the song I never looked into the media that expanded the lore into an actual story...

I don't think of any other version right now... Maybe someone knows of one? But as far as I can tell, this element of the German Snow-White is indeed very neglected. Or when it is brought up, it is played around instead of directly adapted (such as in "Snow White: The Fairest of them All", where the queen transforms herself into Snow White's dead mother at one point)

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The Sleeping Princess - 1921

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Occult fairytalecore

by Elizabeth Elder

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From an interview with Jurij Brězan

I have thought about archetypal similarities between

Sorbian and other national mythology and folklore. The

original Sorbian sagas and legends were all lost in the

Middle Ages. They disappeared because of the terrible

situation of our people, who were beset by economic

hardships and intense suffering. Throughout the Middle

Ages we did not have any teachers or priests who could

have written and preserved our literary traditions. Con-

sequently, the greater portion of our sagas, legends, and

folklore has disappeared, except for a few verses of folk

songs or a few lines from fairy tales. Krabat first ap-

peared in the late Middle Ages, and his story is our most

well known and oldest saga. I am knowledgeable about

classical Greek mythology and cannot find any similari-

ties between Greek and Sorbian mythology.

Classical mythology was twisted and subverted by the rise of

Christianity, so it is difficult to compare precisely the

effect of one on the other. Strangely enough, there are

similarities between French and Sorbian folklore. The

fox and the wolf are two of the most popular figures in

both French and Sorbian folktales. There are many Sor-

bian folktales and fairy tales with a wolf and a fox as

primary characters. I have always been fascinated by

fairy tales, and have read many French ones. To my sur-

prise, I have discovered unexpected similarities between

the two that I have encountered nowhere else.

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THAT'S MY GOLDEN BALL!

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The fact there's this fairy king named "Demogorgon" ALWAYS cracks me up every time I see it X)

Trivia of the day: Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales strongly imply (if not outright say) that enchanters are the male counterparts to fairies.

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𝔞 𝔴𝔞𝔩𝔨 𝔱𝔥𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔬𝔬𝔡𝔰