10:56 am | 03 July 2003 | Rose-red

FIRST: oooohhhhh!! I want to go here! I am so jealous, for once.

Unsurprisingly, I have been obsessed with fairytales for a long time. Not Kennedys-and-Princess-Diana kind, and not the Disney kind, either. No, I mean the old-school, terrifying, death-obsessed, frequently moral-less, Teutonic-and-Arabic jobs where, like, a giant timber wolf morphs into a glacier and beheads the Prince and everyone kind of shrugs and then continues to thatch their roofs or whatever. THAT'S life, comrades. In the original story, the Little Mermaid DIES.*

I loved the Green, Blue, and Red Fairy Books. I loved Anderson and the Bros Grimm. I was super down with the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and A Thousand and One Nights and Y Mabinogion and stuff.

So, even knowing me as little as you do, it makes sense that one of my faves as a kid was the story of Snow-White and Rose-Red** (this version isn't really related to the Snow White of Disney fame; although it does involve a dwarf, he is an evil one and gets killed).

I will now paraphrase it shittily for you. I am mas hungover, so i don't have time for pretty turns of phrase. Sorry.

�����So the sisters, Snow-White and Rose-Red, are sitting in their cabin with their elderly caretaker (i think it's a great-aunt). It's winter and they've come in from gathering sticks and are warming themselves by the fire. And there's a knock on the door. Jeepers creepers, it's a giant bear! But he convinces them to let him come in and defrost (apparently the fact that it's a TALKING BEAR does not provoke any alarm). Eventually they get over their fear of the bear and start wrasslin' with him and whatnot; he always pretends to let them win and says "Oh! Spare my life!"
�����This goes on all winter; by the time spring rolls around, they are the best of friends, what with the girls cleaning the burrs out of the bear's coat and weaving him garlands and stuff. Then one day, the bear said, "Babes, I gotta jet" "Where?" they asked him. "I must go to the wood and protect my treasure from the wicked dwarfs. In winter, when the ground is frozen, they can't get to it; but now they will try to steal it." The girls were sad to hear this, but they understood. They unbarred the door so the bear could leave; as he did, he caught part of his fur on the latch, and Rose thought she glimpsed something shiny glittering through the fur. But the bear ran hastily away.
�����Blah blah blah. Time passes. The girls are out in the woods collecting firewood (i think that's all they did in olden times) and they come upon this dwarf whose beard is stuck in a tree (i know, what?) He's jumping around and cursing. "Help me, you blockheads!" he shrieks unpleasantly. So the girls try to dislodge the beard, but can't--eventually they have to trim off a few inches with scissors. "Way to go, assholes!" the dwarf says (sort of). Then he grabs a sack of gold out from under a log and runs away.�����In typical fairytale fashion, this happens twice more. Then, one day, the girls are out again and they hear the dwarf's voice. "Please, Bear, spare my life!" he shrieks. The girls round the corner and their old friend the bear is glaring at the dwarf. The dward looks around wildly for an escape. "L-Look!" he shrieks, points. "Wouldn't you rather eat those tender young girls instead?" And the bear SMITES HIM WITH A MIGHTY PAW and kills the dwarf. Sweet!
�����This was a little bit much for the girls, who turned and were leaving. But the bear's called out behind them. Yeah, you guessed it. They turned around, and the bear was actually a prince dressed in gold, who'd been under some wack enchantment by the dwarf adn now that he's dead youknowtherest. The End.

So here's the thing. I always identified much more with that idea--that my prince wouldn't be some foppy porcelain be-hosed-and-doubleted pretty-boy who ventured out only long enough to daintily slay a dragon. No, he'd be rambling around with burrs stuck to his sides, thinking, "Shit, i'm in a bear suit. Dude. This is pretty bad." And i'm no Snow White, either. I'm much more like Rose Red, who by all accounts was barefooting it through the Black Forest, climbing trees and getting dirty, twigs stuck in her hair, a little sunburnt, a little wild. I mean, if a prince came up to me, I'd be skeeved out. But i like bears. clm.

* The original Hans Christian Anderson story is TERRIBLE. I mean it's good, but so scary. Okay. The Little Mermaid wants to meet the Prince, so she goes to the sea-witch, whose house is surrounded by the corpses of other mermaids, and the witch agrees to make a potion that will give her legs, but only in exchange for the mermaid's tongue. Which gets cut out. AND every step she takes with her human legs will feel like she is stepping on blades and knives; and, the moment the Prince marries anyone but her, she will die. But she does it ANYWAY.
�����She goes ashore, and lives at the palace. But the Prince proposes to some other princess, because the mermaid can't talk. And the big deal is, mermaids don't have souls, so she is just going to turn into seafoam when he marries this other broad. Anyway she's chilling on the Prince's wedding ship and her sisters come up the the surface, bald-headed, and say they sold their hair to the witch to get a potion that will give her her feet back, but i think she has to also stab the Prince or something to make it work. And she won't do it. And the sun rises and she DIES. Only, because she was so virtuous and whatnot, she gets a soul and goes to Heaven. THAT'S her reward: the shaft. That's crap! I love it!

** I kind of want this, even though i am generally wary of reinterpreted stuff.