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Fourth Pig
The Fourth Pig, originally published in 1936, is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of fairy tales, poems, and ballads. Droll and sad, spirited and apprehensive, The Fourth Pig reflects the hopes and forebodings of its era but also resonates with those of today. It is a testament to the talents of Naomi Mitchison (1897 - 1999), who was an irrepressible phenomenon - a significant Scottish political activist as well as a prolific author. Mitchison's work, exemplified by the tales in this superb new edition, is stamped with her characteristic sharp wit, magical invention, and vivid political and social consciousness.
Mitchison rewrites well-known stories such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Little Mermaid," and she picks up the tune of a ballad with admiring fidelity to form, as in "Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man." Her experimental approach is encapsulated in the title story, which is a dark departure from "The Three Little Pigs." And in the play Kate Crackernuts, the author dramatizes in charms and songs a struggle against the subterranean powers of fairies who abduct humans for their pleasure. Marina Warner, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and fiction author, provides an insightful introduction that reveals why Mitchison's writing remains significant.
The Fourth Pig is a literary rediscovery, a pleasure that will reawaken interest in a remarkable writer and personality.
Mitchison rewrites well-known stories such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Little Mermaid," and she picks up the tune of a ballad with admiring fidelity to form, as in "Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man." Her experimental approach is encapsulated in the title story, which is a dark departure from "The Three Little Pigs." And in the play Kate Crackernuts, the author dramatizes in charms and songs a struggle against the subterranean powers of fairies who abduct humans for their pleasure. Marina Warner, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and fiction author, provides an insightful introduction that reveals why Mitchison's writing remains significant.
The Fourth Pig is a literary rediscovery, a pleasure that will reawaken interest in a remarkable writer and personality.
257 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1936
7 people are currently reading
236 people want to read
About the author
Naomi Mitchison
163 books137 followersNaomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.
Praise for Naomi Mitchison:
"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer
"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly
"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement
"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts
"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 24, 2018
5! (NOT 4 1/2) think fantasy, not fairy tales
Short Review
This 1936 book is a collection of tales by Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999). I’d never heard of her before. I am inlove awe.
Published by Princeton U.P. in a series called Oddly Modern Fairy Tales, the first story, The Fourth Pig, is narrated by the younger sister of the three brother pigs who we all know. She tells us that the Wolf is on the prowl, that he may be disguised “as kindly sheep or helpful horse”. She even wonders, “can I be sure that the Wolf is not in me, that I am not myself the Wolf’s finally clever and successful disguise? … My three brothers are now all afraid … I can sing the song still, the brave song of the pigs … and we will die waving the Pig banner … I know I am afraid, and afraid almost all the time … the noise of our singing doesn’t keep the fear out any longer. I can smell the wolf’s breath … I can hear the padding of the wolf’s feet a very long way off in the forest, coming nearer. And I know there is no way of stopping him. Even if I could help being afraid. But I cannot help it. I am afraid now.”
(None of the other tales are so tense and fearful as this one.)
But the book is not really a book of fairy tales, unless you mean the “oddly modern” type. This world that seems vaguely like the Brothers Grimm, is the fictional world of NM’s imagination. It is perhaps similar to the world of one of her most famous novels, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which “has been variously described as a love story, historical fiction, a mythic tale, a proto-feminist novel, a fairy tale, a questing story, pure fantasy, and a damn good book.” ( https://literarytransgressions.wordpr...)
NM was a champion of the lower classes, a vocal feminist and strong advocate for women’s rights (particularly birth control), taking up one banner after another for progressive causes, aiding in the Botswana independence movement, visiting African Americans and share-croppers in the U.S. south; all while writing scores of books over her long lifetime. The writer Ali Smith wrote an introductory essay for the 2009 edition of Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood, the first part of NM’s autobiography. And Marina Warner, in her Introduction, writes that NM “seems ripe for Bloomsbury-style fandom.”
The Intro is biography, appreciation, and literary critique. In it Warner writes of the reasons why Mitchison’s modernity is “less than complete”, one of which was her “passionate belief in the mythical imagination”, which she defended against “the high status of rationality and skepticism”; she liked to write of witches and witchcraft, and displayed a streak of neo-paganism. (None of this out of any personal belief system.)
Main Review
Marina Warner
Marina Warner also contributed the Further Reading list. Ms. Warner is both distinguished and accomplished, an academic historian, fiction writer and literary critic. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. Warner recently served as chair of the judging panel for the 2015 Man Booker International prize.
Naomi Mitchison
Following is my very loose paraphrasing of interesting stuff about NM from Warner’s Intro.
Naomi, always acting with a purpose, never frivolous, sometimes playful but only to take a break from her serious concerns: the independence of Botswana, the feminist fights for equality and birth control, justice for the working class; or, to leave the plane of social activism, and move from there to the one of literary imagination … Trying to inject myth and magic back into the over-civilized, smoothed over, lackluster modern imagination, the day-to-day drudgery instilled by the industrial revolution, twisted and perverted beyond even the ravages of capitalism by the horrors of the World Wars; though at the time these tales were written, the Spanish Civil War was only announcing the specter of totalitarianism which was descending on Europe.
Which brings us to the stories.
The Tales.
In addition to stories, the tales in this book include six poems, a four-act play, and a short memoir.
Several of the tales are re-imaginings of various writings from the past: The Fourth Pig, Frogs and Panthers (a re-telling of Aristophanes’ play The Frogs), Hansel and Gretle, Adventure in the Debateable Land (a “Maiden in the Tower” story), The Little Mermaiden (closely connected to Hans Christian Anderson’s story), Brunhilde’s Journey down the Rhine (a take on Wagner’s version of the Burnhilde myth), and the play, Kate Crackernuts (based on a Scottish fairy tale that appeared in a collection in the 1890s).
These “oddly modern” re-imaginings are often totally new tales, the connection with a traditional version very thin, very tenuous, only enough to let the reader identify it before veering away down some untrodden path.
An example is NM’s “The Snow Maiden”. She may have started with something like this, which was known in English translation in the late nineteenth century: “Snegurochka, The Snow Maiden, is a character in Russian fairy tales. In one version, she is the daughter of Spring the Beauty and Father Frost”
NM’s take begins, “Once again the Snow Maiden was born, the daughter of January and April. Once again she was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again, for her safety, her parents sent her to life amongst the mortals … her name was Mary”.
As she grows up, Mary has goals and ambitions. She loves mathematics, and is friends with Bert, a like-minded boy. Then, when she was “near seventeen, and it seemed like it was sure she was to get a scholarship at the University”, the boyfriend of her friend Betty accosts Mary, putting his arms around her, “squeezing her up like the bad men on the movies.” Mary gets away, but the incident becomes known, and “there are some who said it was her fault, there always are when it’s a girl”; Betty, in a snit, lures Bert away from Mary.
From here things go downhill, in many different directions. When the 12-page story ends, Mary has eventually succumbed to the boy who accosted her, married him, and obeyed him when he tells her “to drop all this schooling – he didn’t want a scholar, he wanted a pretty kid to come back to in evenings.” And then – “well then, she just seemed to melt away, to fade right out somehow ... [and the tale comes full circle] Once again the Snow Maiden was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again he caught her and touched her with his rays, and once again the Snow Maiden melted away, was dissolved into nothing, became no more than a story which is ended.”
So this fable, originally about the made-from-snow daughter of mythical beings who melts when she finds human love, is radically recast, with the protagonist now a victim of social injustice and the belittling of women, leading to the vanishing not of the maiden, but of the maiden’s dreams.
There’s also a beautiful, poignant poem that treats a similar theme. Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man is a four page tale of the initial love of Mairi for her “fairy man”, then her gradual disillusionment over the years as she realizes what her lot in the relationship is. But she perseveres, and although she must bear heartache, insists that she is the fairy man’s creative equal.
It starts
The stuff of fairy tales.
There are only a couple tales that don’t have references to talking animals, magic spells, witches, fantasy lands, enchanted princes, mythical beings, etc. (For actual fairies, see next section.)
But these fairy tale ingredients are used by NM to make strange concoctions greater than the sum of their parts. There are other worlds in these stories, other places whose names move from one tale to another: Fairy Hill and Fairy Land; the Debateable Land; the Clefted Ground; even Middle Earth! (The Hobbit did not appear until the next year. NM and Tolkien were good friends, and she was a proof reader for The Lord of the Rings.)
What I was most impressed by in some of the tales was NM’s astonishing imagination. The example I remember most clearly is from Soria Moria Castle. The castle in question starts out a sand castle, made by the narrator - but by the second sentence she finds herself crossing the cardboard drawbridge into the castle, and before the first paragraph is over she has being led into the interior by a witch intent on eating her. This tale, over twenty pages long, chronicles the adventures she has in escaping the witch, which entail amazing alternative existences experienced, courtesy of her captor: first as a wheat plant, ground into flour and baked into a cake; then as a grape-vine, whose grapes are made into wine; finally as a piece of ore, made into a giant cannon. All these before finally escaping from the witch as the castle is washed away by waves.
Here’s some of the flavor of this inventive tale, from the five-page life of a grapevine.
Fairies.
Separate section because of the prevalence of the fairy people in these tales. Although there is quite a spectrum of views about fairies in mythology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy#Ch...), NM’s is likely the most common: that fairy-people are often antagonistic towards humans, and capable of going well beyond “mischief” in their dealings with us. They cast spells and work magic entirely for their own ends, and don’t much care how we get hurt.
The tales which give this view of fairies most forcefully are Kate Crackernuts, Adventure in the Debateable Land, and Mirk, Mirk Night - all of which I rated as 5 stars.
Heroines.
Some of the best tales in the book are those about, or told by, a heroine. I’ve already quoted from Soria Moria Castle.
Brunhilde's Journey down the Rhine can also be mentioned, but she’s a victim as well as a staunch warrior who, seeing her fate, laments to her horse the twilight of her idol.
Adventure in the Debateable Land (16 pp) finds the narrator in a taxi, a “voice” telling her she’s going to the Debateable Land. What for? “To rescue her, idiot!” says an old frog in the corner of the seat.
The taxi contains a long list of essentials, a short sample: “shoes of swiftness, seven league boots … cloak of invisibility … bridle for taming wild horses, drops of Water of Life, other drops of Lethe water for Dragon … gloves for handling red-hot iron …” During her adventure, most of her essentials are lost or stolen. She finally finds the tower holding the princess, but there’s five of them, all having turned into almost life-size dolls with china eyes - how to know which to rescue? She chooses the one on the left with the footstool. It’s the wrong one - but the young girl is grateful when she’s brought back to the taxi, since she’s a mill-hand in Middle Earth. “I’ve got to get off to work, but we’ll meet again.”
Mirk, Mirk, Night is the last tale in the book. An imaginative fantasy, a coming of age story, the quest which the heroine sets out on from Fairy Land is that of finding and rescuing herself, though she doesn’t understand how or why, or where she is attempting to escape to. Absolutely magical, really a stunning denouement. When I had read the last words I picked up my pen and wrote, just left wordless, pondering – very affected, the last referring to the tears in my eyes.
Poems
I rated the poems in a range of 3.5 to 5. These are the ones I liked a lot, besides Mairi MacLean (quoted above).
Pause in the Corrida, in which the opening line, “Black bulls of hate, charging across the mind, You are met here, are stopped here” is mindful of the Spanish Civil War.
Omen of the Enemy has this introduction: (On Friday July 12th 1935 a cormorant, usual disguise of the Evil One, alighted once again on the cross of St. Paul’s), and includes the lines
“… Must then all worship? …
Which of us not condemning our innocents to the maw of the cormorant,
Which of us will insist, against beak-thrusts in guts, against gold?
Who of us will stand, in London, will not bow down?”
And here’s The Border Loving, short and poignant.
Short Review
This 1936 book is a collection of tales by Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999). I’d never heard of her before. I am in
Published by Princeton U.P. in a series called Oddly Modern Fairy Tales, the first story, The Fourth Pig, is narrated by the younger sister of the three brother pigs who we all know. She tells us that the Wolf is on the prowl, that he may be disguised “as kindly sheep or helpful horse”. She even wonders, “can I be sure that the Wolf is not in me, that I am not myself the Wolf’s finally clever and successful disguise? … My three brothers are now all afraid … I can sing the song still, the brave song of the pigs … and we will die waving the Pig banner … I know I am afraid, and afraid almost all the time … the noise of our singing doesn’t keep the fear out any longer. I can smell the wolf’s breath … I can hear the padding of the wolf’s feet a very long way off in the forest, coming nearer. And I know there is no way of stopping him. Even if I could help being afraid. But I cannot help it. I am afraid now.”
(None of the other tales are so tense and fearful as this one.)
But the book is not really a book of fairy tales, unless you mean the “oddly modern” type. This world that seems vaguely like the Brothers Grimm, is the fictional world of NM’s imagination. It is perhaps similar to the world of one of her most famous novels, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which “has been variously described as a love story, historical fiction, a mythic tale, a proto-feminist novel, a fairy tale, a questing story, pure fantasy, and a damn good book.” ( https://literarytransgressions.wordpr...)
NM was a champion of the lower classes, a vocal feminist and strong advocate for women’s rights (particularly birth control), taking up one banner after another for progressive causes, aiding in the Botswana independence movement, visiting African Americans and share-croppers in the U.S. south; all while writing scores of books over her long lifetime. The writer Ali Smith wrote an introductory essay for the 2009 edition of Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood, the first part of NM’s autobiography. And Marina Warner, in her Introduction, writes that NM “seems ripe for Bloomsbury-style fandom.”
The Intro is biography, appreciation, and literary critique. In it Warner writes of the reasons why Mitchison’s modernity is “less than complete”, one of which was her “passionate belief in the mythical imagination”, which she defended against “the high status of rationality and skepticism”; she liked to write of witches and witchcraft, and displayed a streak of neo-paganism. (None of this out of any personal belief system.)
Main Review
Marina Warner
Marina Warner also contributed the Further Reading list. Ms. Warner is both distinguished and accomplished, an academic historian, fiction writer and literary critic. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. Warner recently served as chair of the judging panel for the 2015 Man Booker International prize.
Naomi Mitchison
Following is my very loose paraphrasing of interesting stuff about NM from Warner’s Intro.
born in 1897 … grandparents wealthy landowners in Scotland, “with huge chilly castles, salmon brooks, deer-stalking … parents Liberal and progressive and brilliant … father John S. Haldane, distinguished medical biologist at Oxford, deeply concerned for working men and women … her older brother, J.B.S. Haldane, geneticist, biologist, a colossal personality; his transgressiveness, independent-mindedness, sheer cleverness set a bar for Naomi she was always longing to leap; Jack a free, wayward spirit, sacked from Cambridge for adultery with a colleague’s wife (whom he married), became a Communist, and later an Indian nationalist, renouncing his British citizenship … as children they experimented together on scientific questions … Jack went away to Eton, Naomi had to stay behind, even though she was the “rare girl” to attend the boy’s Dragon School in Oxford – her introduction to gender injustice. Her memoir Small Talk catches the stifling restrictions she suffered, never overcoming her ferocious jealousy of her brother – in her stories one finds stamped out “one spirited daredevil young woman after another – wild, strong-limbed and tousled, who break rules, act vigorously." Interjection: Haldane was one of three biologists in the 1920s who did the ground-breaking work resulting in the "modern synthesis" of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. What did science lose when Naomi was denied the right to pursue her first love, science?The Introduction/biographical sketch goes on and on, page after page dense with my underlining and asterisks, check marks, indications of how amazed and affected I was with the tale of this amazing Edwardian woman. A narrative, filled with fact, but also a magical tale about a writer seemingly almost mythical.
Naomi, the faery child, has intense dreams and kept open the connection to childlike wonder and terror. ”I met a brown hare”, she remembers, “and we went off and kept house (marriage as I saw it) inside a corn stook with six oat sheaves propped around us.” She did not know then, she continued, that the hare is closely connected with the moon and the goddess, as well as with witchcraft. ”As I remember it, I was married young to the hare.”
Also a bookworm, by sixteen she had worked her way through The Golden Bough - "relations between magic and society, regeneration rituals, tree cults, all running a live current of atavistic ecstasy” through her writing. Greek and Celtic myths (especially Scottish); brought up among Oxford classicists, spending her summers in the Highlands; drawn to neo-paganism, wrapped in the Celtic Twilight; the varieties of the supernatural blossoming into “contrasting uses of enchantment”: avant-garde demands for liberty (Nietzsche, The Rites of Spring, The Plumed Serpent); and traditionalist nostalgia for a “lost, enchanted pastoral” (Peter Pan, Wind in the Willows).
Naomi, always acting with a purpose, never frivolous, sometimes playful but only to take a break from her serious concerns: the independence of Botswana, the feminist fights for equality and birth control, justice for the working class; or, to leave the plane of social activism, and move from there to the one of literary imagination … Trying to inject myth and magic back into the over-civilized, smoothed over, lackluster modern imagination, the day-to-day drudgery instilled by the industrial revolution, twisted and perverted beyond even the ravages of capitalism by the horrors of the World Wars; though at the time these tales were written, the Spanish Civil War was only announcing the specter of totalitarianism which was descending on Europe.
Which brings us to the stories.
The Tales.
In addition to stories, the tales in this book include six poems, a four-act play, and a short memoir.
Several of the tales are re-imaginings of various writings from the past: The Fourth Pig, Frogs and Panthers (a re-telling of Aristophanes’ play The Frogs), Hansel and Gretle, Adventure in the Debateable Land (a “Maiden in the Tower” story), The Little Mermaiden (closely connected to Hans Christian Anderson’s story), Brunhilde’s Journey down the Rhine (a take on Wagner’s version of the Burnhilde myth), and the play, Kate Crackernuts (based on a Scottish fairy tale that appeared in a collection in the 1890s).
These “oddly modern” re-imaginings are often totally new tales, the connection with a traditional version very thin, very tenuous, only enough to let the reader identify it before veering away down some untrodden path.
An example is NM’s “The Snow Maiden”. She may have started with something like this, which was known in English translation in the late nineteenth century: “Snegurochka, The Snow Maiden, is a character in Russian fairy tales. In one version, she is the daughter of Spring the Beauty and Father Frost”
NM’s take begins, “Once again the Snow Maiden was born, the daughter of January and April. Once again she was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again, for her safety, her parents sent her to life amongst the mortals … her name was Mary”.
As she grows up, Mary has goals and ambitions. She loves mathematics, and is friends with Bert, a like-minded boy. Then, when she was “near seventeen, and it seemed like it was sure she was to get a scholarship at the University”, the boyfriend of her friend Betty accosts Mary, putting his arms around her, “squeezing her up like the bad men on the movies.” Mary gets away, but the incident becomes known, and “there are some who said it was her fault, there always are when it’s a girl”; Betty, in a snit, lures Bert away from Mary.
From here things go downhill, in many different directions. When the 12-page story ends, Mary has eventually succumbed to the boy who accosted her, married him, and obeyed him when he tells her “to drop all this schooling – he didn’t want a scholar, he wanted a pretty kid to come back to in evenings.” And then – “well then, she just seemed to melt away, to fade right out somehow ... [and the tale comes full circle] Once again the Snow Maiden was hated by the sun-god, the man-god, the god of life and potency. Once again he caught her and touched her with his rays, and once again the Snow Maiden melted away, was dissolved into nothing, became no more than a story which is ended.”
So this fable, originally about the made-from-snow daughter of mythical beings who melts when she finds human love, is radically recast, with the protagonist now a victim of social injustice and the belittling of women, leading to the vanishing not of the maiden, but of the maiden’s dreams.
There’s also a beautiful, poignant poem that treats a similar theme. Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man is a four page tale of the initial love of Mairi for her “fairy man”, then her gradual disillusionment over the years as she realizes what her lot in the relationship is. But she perseveres, and although she must bear heartache, insists that she is the fairy man’s creative equal.
It starts
Oh maybe ‘tis my rockThe lilting rhyme seems to fly over the Highlands. Mairi’s disappointments not only fail to deter her, they are the source of her strength. The last stanza ends with her cry of equality:
And maybe ‘tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.
I should be redding my house,
But oh, I’m stepping away
To hear high up in the fern
The tune that the faeries play.
Oh my bonny stone house
With the meal ark full to the brim!
But my fairy man’s in the fern
And I must go away to him.
And it’s Mairi, Mairi MacLean,
Ach, Mairi Maclean, come ben!
But I am stepping away
Adown to the hazelly glen.
Oh folks may look upon Jura,
And he may be rich who can,
But all the Isles of the Sea
Are for me and my fairy man!
Oh maybe ‘tis my rock
And maybe ‘tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.
Oh maybe ‘tis the meal ark
That stands beside the wall,
And maybe ‘tis the weaving,
And I’ll being seeing to all.
And maybe ‘tis the pot,
And maybe ‘tis the pan.
But I can write songs as good
As the songs of the fairy man!
The stuff of fairy tales.
There are only a couple tales that don’t have references to talking animals, magic spells, witches, fantasy lands, enchanted princes, mythical beings, etc. (For actual fairies, see next section.)
But these fairy tale ingredients are used by NM to make strange concoctions greater than the sum of their parts. There are other worlds in these stories, other places whose names move from one tale to another: Fairy Hill and Fairy Land; the Debateable Land; the Clefted Ground; even Middle Earth! (The Hobbit did not appear until the next year. NM and Tolkien were good friends, and she was a proof reader for The Lord of the Rings.)
What I was most impressed by in some of the tales was NM’s astonishing imagination. The example I remember most clearly is from Soria Moria Castle. The castle in question starts out a sand castle, made by the narrator - but by the second sentence she finds herself crossing the cardboard drawbridge into the castle, and before the first paragraph is over she has being led into the interior by a witch intent on eating her. This tale, over twenty pages long, chronicles the adventures she has in escaping the witch, which entail amazing alternative existences experienced, courtesy of her captor: first as a wheat plant, ground into flour and baked into a cake; then as a grape-vine, whose grapes are made into wine; finally as a piece of ore, made into a giant cannon. All these before finally escaping from the witch as the castle is washed away by waves.
Here’s some of the flavor of this inventive tale, from the five-page life of a grapevine.
The same sensations overcame me as had done so upon the first occasion [the wheat], shrinking and hardness and darkness. And again the tension, becoming unbearable, broke into pale, thready growing-points, a pushing up towards light and warmth and down towards dampness and anchorage. And again I grew and spread green leaves and sucked through their pores the gases which dissolved through my warm chloroplasts. But this time I was a stronger growth, my stem thickened and became the bud-points of branchlets … And so, for me as a vine, seasons went by, and at last I was to be part of the vintage … minute green cell clusters swelled to berries … I was aware too of the men who came, aware of their pride in me … I endured the pain of the summer pruning … knowing that the great purpose was coming closer upon us … More and more the “I” that I was became concentrated upon the ripening grape-bunches, purpose and intention of my existence … later … enclosed in the smoothly fitting glass of a wine bottle … I knew that we all waited to be poured into the tingling throats, the hastening blood, of men and women, who through us would become braver and happier and more generous, makers of songs and stories, adventurers and lovers. This was our noble destiny; for this we had once been given the name of a God. Thus then the embottled wine sang in the darkness of its Dionysian fate.But the tale of the wine ends unhappily. Drunk by shallow and callous men, “it was my fate to set free not only the good in mankind but also the evil, not only the dreams of beauty but the nightmares of ugliness … I was dissolved and possessed by these men, and lost forever …”
Fairies.
Separate section because of the prevalence of the fairy people in these tales. Although there is quite a spectrum of views about fairies in mythology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy#Ch...), NM’s is likely the most common: that fairy-people are often antagonistic towards humans, and capable of going well beyond “mischief” in their dealings with us. They cast spells and work magic entirely for their own ends, and don’t much care how we get hurt.
The tales which give this view of fairies most forcefully are Kate Crackernuts, Adventure in the Debateable Land, and Mirk, Mirk Night - all of which I rated as 5 stars.
Heroines.
Some of the best tales in the book are those about, or told by, a heroine. I’ve already quoted from Soria Moria Castle.
Brunhilde's Journey down the Rhine can also be mentioned, but she’s a victim as well as a staunch warrior who, seeing her fate, laments to her horse the twilight of her idol.
Grane, my horse, my horse… let him still be my hero, let him be remembered as he was … Let the pyre to burn the body that was once wise friend of wood-birds, once queller of flames, once Siegfried … Because Siegfried was young and still wise on the mountain top , let build the pyre to wipe out fear with fear and flame with flame until all shall be even as at the first even spinning of the Norns. Let me topple now from the precipice of dark and unbearable flames into the light flames which must for a moment be borne, and then nothing will again be nothing as in the no-time before All-Father wished me into being. Grane, my horse, my horse, because all was once well it makes no difference to the ending.
Adventure in the Debateable Land (16 pp) finds the narrator in a taxi, a “voice” telling her she’s going to the Debateable Land. What for? “To rescue her, idiot!” says an old frog in the corner of the seat.
The taxi contains a long list of essentials, a short sample: “shoes of swiftness, seven league boots … cloak of invisibility … bridle for taming wild horses, drops of Water of Life, other drops of Lethe water for Dragon … gloves for handling red-hot iron …” During her adventure, most of her essentials are lost or stolen. She finally finds the tower holding the princess, but there’s five of them, all having turned into almost life-size dolls with china eyes - how to know which to rescue? She chooses the one on the left with the footstool. It’s the wrong one - but the young girl is grateful when she’s brought back to the taxi, since she’s a mill-hand in Middle Earth. “I’ve got to get off to work, but we’ll meet again.”
Mirk, Mirk, Night is the last tale in the book. An imaginative fantasy, a coming of age story, the quest which the heroine sets out on from Fairy Land is that of finding and rescuing herself, though she doesn’t understand how or why, or where she is attempting to escape to. Absolutely magical, really a stunning denouement. When I had read the last words I picked up my pen and wrote, just left wordless, pondering – very affected, the last referring to the tears in my eyes.
Poems
I rated the poems in a range of 3.5 to 5. These are the ones I liked a lot, besides Mairi MacLean (quoted above).
Pause in the Corrida, in which the opening line, “Black bulls of hate, charging across the mind, You are met here, are stopped here” is mindful of the Spanish Civil War.
Omen of the Enemy has this introduction: (On Friday July 12th 1935 a cormorant, usual disguise of the Evil One, alighted once again on the cross of St. Paul’s), and includes the lines
“… Must then all worship? …
Which of us not condemning our innocents to the maw of the cormorant,
Which of us will insist, against beak-thrusts in guts, against gold?
Who of us will stand, in London, will not bow down?”
And here’s The Border Loving, short and poignant.
The wan water runs fast between us,
It runs between my love and me,
Since the fairy woman has made him a fairy
And sat her down upon his knee.
Eden Water flows cold between us
And west of Eden the Solway tide,
But the fairy woman she came from Ireland
And my love stayed on the further side;
My loves lies snug in Carlisle Castle
With the changeling woman for year-long bride.
Waters of Tweed are deep between us,
Fierce and steep the unridden fells;
But the fairy woman watches the swallows
And tastes the clover and hears the bells,
And my love watches and hears and follows.
February 8, 2016
Naomi Mitchison’s collection off fairy tale retellings or modern fairy tales is poignant reminder of a world between World Wars. The title story is about the Wolf, and it isn’t really a wolf. There is a power and a controlled anger in this first tale.
The stories are also activist stories and poems, in many cases critical of capitalism. They succed in various degrees – the two strongest in this regard are the retelling of Hansel and Gretel and the poem “Furies Dance in New York”. There is also a heartbreaking, yet sadly still true, story about women and their place in the world, “The Snow Maiden”.
But the best is the play “Kate Crackernuts” because quite frankly this story can’t be retold enough times.
The stories are also activist stories and poems, in many cases critical of capitalism. They succed in various degrees – the two strongest in this regard are the retelling of Hansel and Gretel and the poem “Furies Dance in New York”. There is also a heartbreaking, yet sadly still true, story about women and their place in the world, “The Snow Maiden”.
But the best is the play “Kate Crackernuts” because quite frankly this story can’t be retold enough times.
September 29, 2019
18 stories and poems of the fantastic. This peaks early, with the first and titular story about the fourth of the three little pigs and their intimate relationship with the wolf/death--as well as being phenomenally written, an extended but vivid metaphor, it speaks directly to my inner world and I love it more than I can explain. I worried that nothing else in the collection could live up to that, and indeed nothing does, in no small part because I bounced off of most of the poetry--which is fine, similarly strange and fantastic, but slid out of my grasp.
But Michiston's style is diverse, sometimes dreamlike, sometime humorous, frequently evocative. She experiments with form, from dense prose to poetry to an entire five-act play (Kate Crackernuts--unexpectedly good.) Her concept of the fantastic, particularly the depiction of fairyland that reoccurs in later stories, is compelling. "The Little Mermaiden" has a unique outsider-PoV. As with all short fiction collections, the quality varies--and it has perhaps too strong a start. But Mitchison's diversity of themes and styles are effectively cumulative and distinctly her own. I expect this holds up well to rereads.
But Michiston's style is diverse, sometimes dreamlike, sometime humorous, frequently evocative. She experiments with form, from dense prose to poetry to an entire five-act play (Kate Crackernuts--unexpectedly good.) Her concept of the fantastic, particularly the depiction of fairyland that reoccurs in later stories, is compelling. "The Little Mermaiden" has a unique outsider-PoV. As with all short fiction collections, the quality varies--and it has perhaps too strong a start. But Mitchison's diversity of themes and styles are effectively cumulative and distinctly her own. I expect this holds up well to rereads.
May 29, 2023
The Fourth Pig is the sixth book in my tour of Naomi Mitchison’s works, having come across an article about her and thinking she sounded like a fascinating person. It’s a collection of stories and poems inspired by fairy tale and myth and was released in the 1930s as the threat of fascism loomed and the grip of capitalism tightened. At the time, Mitchison was helping her husband as a Labour MP in Birmingham and many of the stories have a Birmingham setting but are quite critical of the Labour Party.
The first story is the title one, it takes the form as a monologue given by the fourth pig. She is younger and never knew the innocent days when it was conceivable to build a house of straw or twigs. Even the brick house is looking incredibly flimsy to her and the wolf lurks as a nameless dread. Though not much of a story in itself, it brings power and fear back to the character of the wolf and makes him dangerous again.
Frogs and Panthers starts with the comic relation between Dionysus and his slave Xanthippe from Aristotle’s The Frogs. Xanthippe declares that being enslaved makes him less of a man and he wishes to be free. Dionysus accepts and the two cross one of The Underworld’s lesser known rivers that bring them to a time and place where there is no slavery and they find themselves in 1930s Birmingham. Xanthippe, now called Ginger finds himself worked to death to merely subside and Dionysus, who is a film star, comes to his deathbed to watch him go. The story leads to the stark conclusion that classical era slavery may hold more freedom and dignity than capitalist wage slavery - a point that I think can be easily debated but is made to be extreme.
Grandaughter is a little piece about a woman in the early 21st Century (so, nowish) who can’t believe how worried the people of her grandparent’s generation were. The left discovered the human need for a little hope and magic, thus robbing fascism of its power and ushering in a happy world built on dancing. Sadly this world is no more than a pleasant fantasy.
In the retelling of Hansel and Gretel, the witch is capitalism. A retelling of The Little Mermaid and The Snow Maiden (a story I didn’t know before) were about how a woman can dissolve into marriage and lose their own self. One of the strangest stories is called Soria Moria, in which the protagonist is sucked into a sandcastle where they meet a witch who wants to eat them. The witch changes them into wheat, grape and steel and the book imagines what it might be like to be wheat, sprouting and growing, being milled into flour and baked into a cake - experiences I’ve never read described before.
Three stories in the book take place in something Mitchison calls ‘The Debateable Land’. It’s a place between reality and faerie, where the rules of both can be debated. These stories are strange and a little hard to follow, as they happen somewhere the certainties of both realms don’t hold full sway, being something closer to a dream than anything else. While the very 1930s preoccupations of many of the other stories feel a little dusty, the invention of The Debateable Land is a really interesting one and something that I think could be taken and developed by other writers.
The first story is the title one, it takes the form as a monologue given by the fourth pig. She is younger and never knew the innocent days when it was conceivable to build a house of straw or twigs. Even the brick house is looking incredibly flimsy to her and the wolf lurks as a nameless dread. Though not much of a story in itself, it brings power and fear back to the character of the wolf and makes him dangerous again.
Frogs and Panthers starts with the comic relation between Dionysus and his slave Xanthippe from Aristotle’s The Frogs. Xanthippe declares that being enslaved makes him less of a man and he wishes to be free. Dionysus accepts and the two cross one of The Underworld’s lesser known rivers that bring them to a time and place where there is no slavery and they find themselves in 1930s Birmingham. Xanthippe, now called Ginger finds himself worked to death to merely subside and Dionysus, who is a film star, comes to his deathbed to watch him go. The story leads to the stark conclusion that classical era slavery may hold more freedom and dignity than capitalist wage slavery - a point that I think can be easily debated but is made to be extreme.
Grandaughter is a little piece about a woman in the early 21st Century (so, nowish) who can’t believe how worried the people of her grandparent’s generation were. The left discovered the human need for a little hope and magic, thus robbing fascism of its power and ushering in a happy world built on dancing. Sadly this world is no more than a pleasant fantasy.
In the retelling of Hansel and Gretel, the witch is capitalism. A retelling of The Little Mermaid and The Snow Maiden (a story I didn’t know before) were about how a woman can dissolve into marriage and lose their own self. One of the strangest stories is called Soria Moria, in which the protagonist is sucked into a sandcastle where they meet a witch who wants to eat them. The witch changes them into wheat, grape and steel and the book imagines what it might be like to be wheat, sprouting and growing, being milled into flour and baked into a cake - experiences I’ve never read described before.
Three stories in the book take place in something Mitchison calls ‘The Debateable Land’. It’s a place between reality and faerie, where the rules of both can be debated. These stories are strange and a little hard to follow, as they happen somewhere the certainties of both realms don’t hold full sway, being something closer to a dream than anything else. While the very 1930s preoccupations of many of the other stories feel a little dusty, the invention of The Debateable Land is a really interesting one and something that I think could be taken and developed by other writers.
November 18, 2022
I'm glad I skipped Marina Warner's introduction and went back to read it to contextualize the stories once I finished, since I think it might've spoiled some of the charm to know the fairytale parallels or the intended social critiques. I still didn't spend much time reading some of the more obscure stories (and mostly skimmed the poetry, including the songs within the Kate Crackernuts play), but I enjoyed enough of the stories to merit somewhere around four stars for pretty prose, female-led fantastical adventures, and interesting retellings of some classic fairy tales. My favorites:
*The Fourth Pig: I enjoyed the extended metaphor of the pig's fear of the wolf (with the pig as a sort of stand-in for humanity).
*Hansel and Gretel: Sadly realistic and not too similar to the story it gets its title from, but recognizable in a way other stories (and poems) weren't.
*The Snow Maiden: Maybe too sad, but not at all unrealistic . Probably could use a trigger warning because , but it's pretty clear that it's going to be a dark story about the limitations placed on women's lives so it's not exactly surprising.
*Soria Maria Castle: Up there with The Fourth Pig when it comes to lovely and kind of brutal nature-focused prose. A better witch than Hansel and Gretel, and I loved the descriptions of the transformations and the playful frame .
*Kate Crackernuts: I liked the female-led adventuring and the foregrounding of sisterly love.
*Adventure in Debateable Land: Kind of reminded me of Shrek and The Phantom Tollbooth, but a little less accessible. Could be worth rereading with less skimming.
*The Little Mermaiden: One of the more recognizable fairy tale retellings, and probably the only way I'll ever be able to stomach the "original" little mermaid story . I liked the perspective she chose to tell the story from, and appreciated the appropriately monstrous mermaids.
*The Fourth Pig: I enjoyed the extended metaphor of the pig's fear of the wolf (with the pig as a sort of stand-in for humanity).
*Hansel and Gretel: Sadly realistic and not too similar to the story it gets its title from, but recognizable in a way other stories (and poems) weren't.
*The Snow Maiden: Maybe too sad, but not at all unrealistic . Probably could use a trigger warning because , but it's pretty clear that it's going to be a dark story about the limitations placed on women's lives so it's not exactly surprising.
*Soria Maria Castle: Up there with The Fourth Pig when it comes to lovely and kind of brutal nature-focused prose. A better witch than Hansel and Gretel, and I loved the descriptions of the transformations and the playful frame .
*Kate Crackernuts: I liked the female-led adventuring and the foregrounding of sisterly love.
*Adventure in Debateable Land: Kind of reminded me of Shrek and The Phantom Tollbooth, but a little less accessible. Could be worth rereading with less skimming.
*The Little Mermaiden: One of the more recognizable fairy tale retellings, and probably the only way I'll ever be able to stomach the "original" little mermaid story . I liked the perspective she chose to tell the story from, and appreciated the appropriately monstrous mermaids.
November 6, 2017
Not because it’s perfect but because Naomi mitchison seems like an amazing socialist witch goddess (who I wish I could be friends with in my lifetime), and I love getting a peek into her brain and imagination. Most of the snippets are insightful and thoroughly entertaining too. :)
June 24, 2019
forgot to tag this when I actually finished it. book is fine - read for school enjoyed parts of it but wasn't madly in love with it either
July 7, 2015
More a three and a half: what she was doing here was interesting, but some of these feel like very early and not entirely successful essays at blending fairytale motifs into modern life concerns, and that she got a whole lot better at doing that (and of course a whole lot of other people have also done that thing since 1936, so it also comes over as much less fresh than it would have done in the 30s - though there were other works of the period doing similar mashups).
May 22, 2015
Only a few stories were outstanding, but all were interesting, at least. The title story was by far my favorite.
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