A version of this appears in The Bald Princess and Other Tales by me!
One of my favorite things about original fairy tales is how absolutely, unequivocally weird they are.
Modern retellings, my own included, often take the clearest elements of a fairy tale, or the only most basic, underlying structure of the tale, and reapply it in a way that is logical for modern times. For example, you’ll see many Beauty and the Beast retellings that try to eliminate tropes which are now considered problematic—such as themes of bestiality or Stockholm syndrome. You’ll see Cinderella retellings where Cinderella chooses to stay with her family, or ends up encountering the prince well before the ball, so she’s not just running off with a complete stranger. Or retellings of Goose Girl, where the princess has a backbone and doesn’t only rely on magic to solve her problem.
And as part of this process of creating modern retellings, the element of weirdness that permeates so many of the original fairy tales gets written out. Gone are the little surprise nuggets that make you go, “Wait, what just happened?”
Consider, for a moment, Snow White and Rose Red, also known as The Ungrateful Dwarf: in the middle of the original story, the sisters come upon a dwarf with his beard stuck in a tree. Why on earth was his beard stuck in a tree?
The first time I read it, I reread it to make sure I understood, and laughing out loud as the letters “WTF” floated through my brain. Or in the original tale of Cinderella, to make their feet fit into the shoe, her stepsisters chop off their own toes and heels. And in The Little Mermaid, she has to kill the prince and let his blood drip on her feet to turn back into a mermaid.
Those are more well-known stories, but if you get into some of the lesser-known tales, the weird elements get even weirder—in The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage, all three aforementioned elements are characters who live together in a house. Just the premise is bizarre. Or have you read Hans the Hedgehog, in which a woman gives birth to a half-boy, half-hedgehog? Or The Three Snake Leaves? Or The Ungrateful Son? And the ones I’ve mentioned so far are just European fairy tales. If you explore stories across the world, like The Bird With Nine Heads, The Woman With Two Skins, The Man With His Leg Tied Up, you will find a wealth of surprising, quirky, and delightful elements mixed in with violence, fear, and destruction.
The weird and wacky abound in old fairy tales, mostly utilized as a technique to teach a lesson (though to be sure, there are more than enough tales that are just weird, with no obvious lesson in sight). As odd as it is, the story The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage teaches the reader to find contentment doing what they’re good at; The Ungrateful Son teaches that one should be generous and not greedy; Cinderella teaches that kindness will be rewarded.
But now, many of the lessons previous fairy tales taught us no longer apply. Little Red Riding Hood teaches children to fear the woods, but should we teach our children to fear the woods? Or should we teach them to understand it? And cutting open the wolf with an axe as a solution to the violence it committed would probably be frowned upon by most. And we’re glad Cinderella found a way out of her awful situation, but was marrying a complete stranger really the best option? If the fairy godmother could offer her a fancy dress and a ride to the ball, why couldn’t she have magicked up a job interview or a couple thousand dollars for Cinderella to move to a new city instead?
As society changes, its general values change as well. And the stories we tell reflect those changing values. Or rather, I believe the stories we tell should reflect our changing values.
In 2021, I went on a reading binge, focusing almost exclusively on fairy tale retellings. I read ones you’ve probably heard of, and ones you haven’t. I read fantasy and sci-fi retellings, romance retellings, even some down the pretty steamy end of things, even though steamy isn’t really my cup of tea. I watched a lot of movies too—Holiday fairy tale retellings, young adult retellings, TV shows like Once Upon A Time and Grimm. And I found I was, by and large, rather disappointed.
Sure, there were a few I really liked. And a few I hated. But what I was mostly disappointed by was how closely the underlying values in the modern retellings aligned with the values of the original tales. Are we really still teaching ourselves to be afraid of the unknown? Are we still trying to tell women and girls that their priority in life is marriage to a man? Is true romantic love the only important thing in life?
What about personal agency? What about consent? And having the freedom to make a choice?
Why not teach ourselves what finding choices looks like, or creating love rather than magically being struck with it? Or that not everything is about hard work, and working ourselves to the bone doesn’t make us better than anyone else?
Why not include disabled people in our stories? Or write stories of friendship and trust?
And after some contemplation, what I decided was that perhaps it wasn’t the retellings that were the problem. Perhaps it was the original tales themselves.
So I decided to write some of my own.
The Bald Princess and Other Tales collection of fairy tales reflects me, mostly. It reflects my values, and the underlying themes are those which are important to me. I tend to repeatedly explore themes of personal agency, learning how to change your mind, accepting (or not accepting) the hand you’ve been dealt, what strength looks like, forgiving yourself, and finding ways to connect with and understand people who are different from you.
I don’t claim to speak for everyone. I don’t even mean to suggest that my own values are clear or obvious in these stories. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that my values are the same as the values of modern culture as a whole.
Instead, all I claim is that in these stories, I attempted to take the quirky oddness I loved in all the old fairy tales I’ve explored, and blend them with values I wish I’d learned from the fairy tales I grew up with.
