Lord Dunsany meets old time radio

Stumbling through the Old Time Radio Catalog website, I happened upon the free episodes for the day (they are available for about three days, so you can get this one starting from January 13). Imagine my surprise to find an episode featured on the early Black Mass radio program titled "Lord Dunsany How the Enemy Came to Tlunrana"! One of Dante's Heart's favorite authors, Lord Dunsany wrote, among many other titles, The King of Elfland's Daughter, from which comes the famous line, "the fields we know" (recently invoked by Neil Gaiman in Stardust). You can listen to a very short radio rendering of "How the Enemy Came to Tlunrana" and perhaps consider our old forms of storytelling in the oral tradition and reading to family and friends in the evening on a cold winter's night such as we lately are enjoying.

Terri Windling's "Feline Folklore"

Happy Thanksgiving to our readers in the U.S.! Just before the holiday, I thought I would give everyone a link to a wonderful, brief article I have found on Feline Folklore. The article is by Terri Windling, author of The Wood Wife and co-editor of the former Journal of Mythic Arts, which we miss. The article is a wonderful tracing of cat lore across cultures and centuries, from the early associations of the cat with the mother goddess to recent retellings of fairy tales by such luminaries as Jane Yolen and others. Someone had asked on Sur La Lune if anyone knew of a fairy tale in which a human princess gives birth to kittens, and that set me on the track.

I offer the first paragraph of Windling's essay here, and I hope you will read the whole article:

A friend of mine once dreamed that she was in the throes of giving birth — not an unusual dream for a woman to have, but in this case instead of a human child, she gave birth to a litter of kittens. "Were you frightened?" I asked. "Not at all," she replied. "In fact, strange as it sounds, it was quite a lovely experience." I thought of my friend when I read Laurie Kutchin's poem "Birthdream," published in The New Yorker: "This time I had given birth to a child with a remarkable tail. Part animal, part girl. . . . I held her briefly in my arms, stroked her tail before we parted, her eyes nursing the dark moons. . . ."

Also, if you know of other tales in which a human mother gives birth to kittens, please visit Sur La Lune and add your knowledge to their message board. The only other tale I have been able to find is an Indian folktale, Roshni's Feast, in which a child is exchanged for a kitten in the cradle.

If you don't know of Sur La Lune already, it is a wonderful site that includes both a thriving message board devoted to fairy tales, and an online encyclopedia of fairy tales. So very worth checking out.

The painting above is Gertrude Jekyll's nineteenth-century Puss in Boots.

Daniel
Editor, Dante's Heart

Classic Fairy Tale Illustrations at Your Fingertips!

Often lauded as a publisher of some of the least expensive classics around, Dover Publications has long been a friend to the mythology and folklore community. Now featuring a "Dover Sampler" where you can sign up for notifications about new books, Dover is again celebrating the great fairy tale illustrators of the golden age of children's book illustration. Its recent publication, Once Upon a Time...: A Treasury of Classic Fairy Tale Illustrations, features, among many, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane, and Kay Nielsen, whose ethereal scenes and characters stamped a new look on the genre. I am always amazed at Dover's varied interests and the fine quality of these, by any standard, reasonably-priced gems. Enjoy!

Article on Urban Fantasy

Dear readers, by accident I stumbled across an article summarizing the folkloric roots and recent growth of that strand of mythic fiction that publishers are dubbing "urban fantasy": take a look. The article is (well) titled "The City Fantastic," and it appeared in Library Journal a few days ago.

For those studying, reading, or hoping to write urban fantasy, the article also includes an impressive bibliography of recent work, from Charles de Lint's short stories to the Anita Blake vampire novels to the recent hit Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The list is definitely worth a look.

This already-thriving genre is quite vigorous. My own first encounter with it was a Charles de Lint story in which a street youth was picked up by the police for freeing the captive urban bicycles with a pair of chain-cutters, so that the bicycles could return to the wilds of the inner city streets. The narrator hears, or imagines she hears, the sound of bicycle bells in the rain, as the freed bicycles wheel away into the dark....

Folklore Resource

Topix has an ongoing news feed that draws articles from newspapers around the globe pertaining to the study or the practice of folklore. For example, recent articles highlight upcoming books, the founding of centers for the study of folklore, new graduate degrees and research projects, and the touring of traditional Serbian dances. Having found this resource, I plan on checking it frequently. The feed is also searchable. Just click on Wire. The feed updates many times a day, and of course is available as an RSS. It's an efficient and tantalizing way to get a quick daily or weekly view of the richness of folklore and folkloric study currently happening in our world.

Midsummer Night's Dream Sculpture - A Fountain by Charles Vess

Charles Vess, that artist who knows Faerie so well - illustrator for Stardust and some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, among many other wonderful projects - is together with artist David Spence in the late stages of a truly massive sculpting project - a fountain commissioned by the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia featuring figures from A Midsummer Night's Dream - Titania the Queen of Faery; Robin Goodfellow, that merry wanderer of the night (see his form taking shape above); an assortment of woodland creatures and wild faeries leaping, like this one below, out of the marble with wild abandon:

Like a shrewd and knavish sprite myself, I am thieving this story shamelessly from the Endicott Mythic Arts blog, in case some of my readers do not know of the project or read the blog. (If you don't, you should!) Longtime readers of this blog may remember my passion for fairy tale statues.

The best news is that Charles Vess has offered a generous article at the Green Man Review chronicling the way that the project has taken shape - conception, design, and all the beautiful work and merry mishaps that then ensue. Of the making of Titania, Vess writes in jocular, if rueful, good humor:

We were, perhaps, a little more than a week away from completion when the faeries began to laugh at us mere mortals. I was working below the face you see above and heard a series of small cracks. I looked up and Queen Titania slowly leaned forward, bending over as if to kiss me perhaps? But that’s 300 or so pounds of clay we’re talking about. A central steel pipe had snapped and down she came, to rest gently on a scaffolding that I quickly swung under her form.

She has an air of having just stepped out of a mist or out of the hollow hills - of being only barely present in our world. Titania rises 16 feet high in the center of the fountain, as befits a Queen. 16 feet - think Michelangelo's David, and then consider that five centuries have not made the sculptor's task much easier than it was then. I encourage all our readers to visit Vess's article. It makes for an exciting read, and the photos of the sculptures are breathtaking. They are Charles Vess drawings sprung into three-dimensional life - something I had not even dreamed of when reading Stardust or other works. Now, seeing the sculptures, I wonder how I couldn't have dreamed of them. They are beautiful - though photos do sculptures no justice. Is anyone with me on wanting to check their spare change for a trip to this Virginia theater in a few months?