The Fairy Tale -- AT WAR!

Fairy tale battles and soldiers

What could be less like a fairy tale than a war?

Well, any number of things.

This is not to say that you could easily rewrite a fairy tale into full-fledged military fiction. Like fairy-tale weddings¹, fairy-tale wars can often be disposed of in a single sentence. Seldom more than a paragraph. But they are there.

Maid Maleen, for instance, escaped the tower she had been imprisoned with her maid. The two women, having been told they would be let out in seven years, realized that no one was coming, so they pried their way out -- and found there was no one to come. While they were imprisoned, war had utterly ravaged the kingdom. We never learn what happened to the king, her father, who imprisoned her. Though we do learn that Maid Maleen and the maid had eat raw nettles while escaping the kingdom.

We learn even less about the wars in such fairy tales as Bearskin, where a discharged soldier, desperate, makes a deal with the Devil; The Twelve Dancing Princesses, where a former soldier dares to find out what happens to the dancing princesses; and La Ramee And The Phantom, in which a soldier leaving the army (because his colonel will never make him corporal) happens on a place where a guard must be set over the princess's coffin every night, and be smothered by her phantom, and dares try to disenchant it.

Then, in other variants of those tales, the characters have other backgrounds. A rich man who squandered his wealth and can not keep a job makes the deal, or a shepherd lad gains some magical aid and gives discovering the princesses' secret a go. Or the soldiers, too afraid to keep watch over the coffin after losing so many, persuade a smith to do it instead.

Likewise, Jean The Soldier And Eulalie The Devil's Daughter has Jean returning from his enlistment when he stumbles on the Devil's cottage -- the Devil being, as is typical, a fairy-tale ogre. Or Nix Nought Nothing has the king returning from war when a giant tricks him into giving up his son by a riddling request.

But in neither case is the war significant. Many other tales feature other heroes who stumble on the cottages of evil-minded fairy-tale beings, or make similar foolish bargains, when they are on journeys for other reasons.

This does not change in principle when we read such stories as The Blue Mountains or The Devil's Grandmother where the soldiers desert in the beginning of the story and so stumble into the events of the tale.

True, in The Devil's Grandmother, they are desperate enough -- when their plan to desert strands them, starving -- to make a deal with the Devil, but merely being unable to find a way to live did the same thing in Bearskin.

You get more significant wars in The Girl Without Hands, where the king has to leave the heroine, alone and vulnerable, to have her first child while he fights a war. In Sleeping Beauty -- Perrault's version -- when her prince becomes king, he rashly thinks he can protect Sleeping Beauty and their children, but he has to go to war, and nothing can stop the queen mother then.

War is a common way to send off the king so the queen can be isolated. Sometimes, though, these tales can send the king off on diplomatic visits or hunting expeditions, or even just have him fall ill. Certainly, the reason for the war is never mentioned, and has no significance in the tale. Not even any battles are mentioned.

Now, Iron Hans has more drama, since a battle is crucial to the tale. The prince brings the forces Iron Hans gives him to defend the country, turning the tide and winning the war for the kingdom he is hiding in. The same thing happens in The Hairy Man. Indeed, in The Magician's Horse, the prince defends the land three times against armies.

In various variants, these wars are replaced, but with a tourney, where the hero instead vanquishes all foes in that battle.

A few tales, very few, have plot-crucial armies feature in other manners.

One of them is the horn that, when blown, summons an army. (And dismisses it again when you're done, making for the easiest provisioning ever.) It often appears with other treasures such as a never-emptied purse of gold, or a table that brings meals, and may be lost with them, with craft needed to bring them back.

Not always. When the tsar in Go To I Know Not Where, Bring Back I Know Not What sends off the hero in an attempt to steal his wife in his absence, the hero returns with the treasure, and uses the army it gives him to overthrow him by violence. Even if the battle takes a sentence.

And an army can be significant without a war. In The King of England and his Three Sons and other variants, the sleeping princess wakes up to find the hero took the water of life or the golden apple and goes looking -- frequently with her army. Which doesn't actually lead to fighting, on account of the king's reaction being that her request is very reasonable so let's not fight.

And I used two of these elements in The Enchanted Princess Wakes -- on sale now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple Books, and many other fine online venues.

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