If you were a lost, scared, or determined fairy tale character, where would you go for advice? Certainly not your stepmother, because you can’t trust her. Not your father, because he is either absent, busy planning his own wedding…or standing in the way of yours.
The classic Hero’s Journey plot structure as outlined by Joseph Campbell includes a meeting with a mentor, someone who gives the hero something she needs to complete her quest. It can be something physical, like an egg (more on this later) or wise words to see you through difficult times (when you cross the sea on a griffin’s back, drop a nut into the water so he’ll have a place to rest.)
This week I found the most interesting Grimm’s fairy tale to be The Singing, Springing, Lark. This is an epic tale with so many gaps to be filled that it is begging for a modern retelling.
It starts out very Beauty and the Beast-esque with a daughter agreeing to go live with a lion in order to save her father (who got caught trying to bring her back something from his journey.) He is a lion during the day, but a human at night and the girl falls in love and they marry.
Then the story morphs in to a “rescue the enchanted husband” type tale when the lion is turned into a dove for seven years, ultimately being held prisoner in a castle.
Our intrepid main character follows the drops of blood and feathers he leaves for her until almost seven years are up and she no longer finds them. Now what does she do? For seven years she’s been pursuing her love, and he’s gone. She needs advice.
“I won’t be able to get help from a mortal,” she thinks. So who could she ask?
She calls in all the heavy hitters.
The sun.
…she climbed up to the sun, and said to him, “Thou shinest into every crevice, and over every peak, hast thou not seen a white dove flying?”
The moon.
“Thou shinest the whole night through, and on every field and forest, hast thou not seen a white dove flying?”
The Night Wind
“Thou blowest over every tree and under every leaf, hast thou not seen a white dove flying?” – “No,” said the night wind, “I have seen none, but I will ask the three other winds, perhaps they have seen it.”
The East, West and South wind.
The east wind and the west wind came, and had seen nothing, but the south wind said, “I have seen the white dove…
The Night Wind puts together a plan for her and sends her off with the gifts they’ve given her:
The sun gives her a casket containing a dress, the moon gives her an egg containing a hen and golden chicks, the South Wind tells her the location, and then the Night Wind tells her exactly what to do and gives her a nut to use to grow a tree in the sea.
Here, the story becomes even more like the Norwegian fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
Our heroine helps rescue her husband from the dragon (Note: our second dragon sighting in our reading challenge) he is battling, but then he is whisked further away to another castle to marry someone else. Our heroine will follow and use the tools her advisers have given her to buy herself two nights alone with the prince to try break the curse. (Told you this tale was epic!)
Final source of help: God
…there she heard that soon a feast was to be held, in which they would celebrate their wedding, but she said, “God still helps me,” and opened the casket that the sun had given her.
Our heroine looks to God in her final attempt to save her husband. She acknowledges (by using the word still) that God has been her ultimate source of help all along, guiding her and blessing her efforts.
And our heroine’s husband also credits God on his end of the ordeal:
“Now I really am released! I have been as it were in a dream, for the strange princess has bewitched me so that I have been compelled to forget thee, but God has delivered me from the spell at the right time.”
So, what can modern fairy-tale writers learn about how their characters can get advice or help?
Go big.
The sun, moon, and wind are above the story being played out under them. They can see far off fields and forests and into crevices and under leaves. They can find what our mortal heroine cannot.
Also, they are willing to offer tools and advice to help those who ask. However, they don’t outright fix things for the hero. (Even though our heroine was given these oddly specific gifts–which is kind of a pet peeve of mine–in this story’s final scenes, she had to figure out what to do with those gifts. The advice she was given only took her so far, and then she was left with the tools to solve her own story problem and rescue her husband.)
And, as revealed at the end of the story, the sun, moon, and wind themselves are ultimately under the providence of God.
So, have your characters seek out advice, collect the tools, and then have them solve their own problems (in the confidence that God is working all things for their good.)
