Fairy Tale Retellings

         I’m scheduled to be on a panel about fairy tale retellings at the Readercon Conference on Imaginative Literature later this month, plus I’ve been hard at work on my own collection of fairy tale and mythology-inspired stories, poems, and art, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently.  Perhaps the first thing to get straight is that I’m thinking about “retellings” quite broadly.  We can start, however, with retellings that stick pretty closely to the source tale while simply adding more detail.  One of the all-time greats in that category is Robin McKinley’s Beauty, based on Beauty and the Beast.  Thorn by Instisar Khanani is a retelling of The Goose Girl that also falls into this category.  It can be hard to do a very straightforward retelling well, in part because it’s boring if it doesn’t feel like anything new is added, and in part because fairy tales often don’t quite make sense without adding in sizeable chunks of new plot and character to explain why things happen the way they do.

        Which brings us to retellings that put enough of a twist on the story to give us believable reasons.  Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted is a good example, in which Cinderella is given a magical explanation for her extreme obedience.  Two retellings of Scheherazade also give more powerful explanations for the sultan’s murderous rampage: The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh and A Thousand Nights by E.K. Johnston.

        Moving even farther from the source, a story can be retold from a different, unconventional point of view, for the purpose of highlighting different elements, or even allowing some parts of the story to be completely reinterpreted.  Sleeping Beauty’s little sister gives us a new story in E.D. Baker’s The Wide-Awake Princess, Robin Hood’s daughter gives us new legends in Rowan Hood by Nancy Springer, and we get a sideways view of Scheherazade from a servant in Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner.  Marilyn Singer has written two books of "reverso" fairy tales poems, in which each set of poems gives the same story from two opposite points of view.  This idea of exploring well-known tales from a new point of view can work very well, although it can also be loathed by readers who feel that the source material wasn’t respected, or that the new version doesn’t seem plausible or natural to the story.

        Extreme reader reactions can also be elicited when an author turns the whole thing upside down, as in Disney’s recent crop of fairy tale villain back-stories.  It’s often either love or hate, and I confess that I often hate these… and yet I’ve also written a number of them myself.  It takes skill and delicacy to do it well, but I think it also takes the luck of landing in the hands of a reader who’s receptive to the concept.

        Sometimes the line can be blurry between this category and those “retellings” in which the original story is really just a jumping-off point to head in a whole new direction.  The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson and The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame are both certainly based on the traditional folklore of St George and the Dragon, but are they retellings, riffs, satires, or merely vaguely “inspired by?”  Roshani Chokshi’s Once More Upon a Time begins with The Twelve Dancing Princesses, but doesn’t retell any part of the actual story, instead taking us forward after the fairy tale ends.  Tamsyn Muir’s Princess Floralinda and the Forty Flight Tower clearly begins with a Rapunzel-like set-up, but the fact that her princess has a completely different name is a clue that this is probably a step beyond even a broad definition of “retelling” and possibly just counts as using general fairy tale tropes.

        Then there’s Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, in which a version of Sleeping Beauty is used as a metaphor for an experience of the Holocaust, and Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, in which Cinderella becomes a cyborg mechanic amid sci fi political intrigue.

        All this variation and breadth in fairy tale retellings helps illustrate just how popular, powerful, and resonant these stories are, sticking with us generation after generation…  Which is why I, too, have been creating so many fairy-tale-inspired short stories, poems, and art that I’m putting together a collection.  I expect to launch a Kickstarter campaign in September, and if you’re interested, feel free to fill out my short questionnaire here, and give me some feedback about what book details and backer rewards you’d like to see me incorporate into my project.

        Also, of all the books I’ve mentioned today, I like some better than others.  My absolute favorites are McKinley and Chokshi (and my least favorite is Muir).  You can find slightly longer reviews of a few of the books in these previous posts:

    Scheherazade Retold (Fletcher, Ahdieh, Johnston)

    Reading the Old to the Young (Grahame)

    Books for Hope (Chokshi)

    Reverso Fairy Tales (Singer)

[Picture: Beyond the Thorns, rubber block print (two blocks) by AEGN, 2017 (sold out);

Apotropaic, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]