Heide and Iains latest novel, Disenchanted, is out this month. The fairy tale fantasy comedy was
written with no small assistance from Dr Epiphany Alexander of Sheffield Universitys Department for Folklore and Oral History. As an insight into the research material used to create Disenchanted, we present one of Dr Alexanders letters to the author duo.
My Dear Friends,
I came home from my trip to Leeds to find a copy of your book,
Disenchanted, on my doormat. The
artwork is delightful and the jacket text suggests a very, um, eventful narrative. I
m sure I will love it
and will no doubt be able to give you a critical opinion when we
meet a week on Saturday. It is my
habit to read in the rear study perhaps with a round of cucumber sandwic
hes and a pot of tea. Pak
Choi, my loyal retainer, brews a superior dandelion tea but is, sadly, no
help with the sandwiches (its the cutlery; his folk cannot abide the cold touch of iron). H
owever, I realise now that such niceties
as tea and reading will have to wait for the time being as I must be off again tomorrow.
[Pak Choi has drawn a superior picture of my usual tea]
As I say, I came home to Sheffield to find your book on my doormat
but, in all honesty, I was more
distracted by the vellum parchment I had brought home with me. Its
gruesome origins
notwithstanding, it was a peculiar piece, covered as it was with writing in
a precise hand but of an
ink that had faded to almost total
illegibility. There was little of it I could make out but there was a
clear mention of Langs Black Fairy Book and that alone was enough to send me all aquiver.
I am sure as amateur students of fairy tales, you are aware of the Victorian scholars incomparable
work in collecting and categorising fairy tales. His twelve
coloured
books of fairy tales are well-
known and widely published but I had only ever heard scandalous and dark rumours of this
thirteenth volume. The only other word I could truly make out in the text was
domunculus
which,
whilst seeming tantalisingly familiar, was unknown to me.
To clear my head and perhaps inspire thought, Pak Choi and I took a walk. My house backs onto
Wardsend Cemetery, home to the final resting place of a Lakota Sioux who died in
the city while
performing with Buffalo Bills Wild West Show. There is a local story about how the ghost of the
Sioux flagged down a train and thereby prevented a collision with a derailed coal t
ruck but, delicious
though it is, my research into the matter traces the story back to no
earlier than 1973 and an
argument between two drunken Sheffield Wednesday fans in the Masons Arms. This is how
fairy
tales are born.
We cut through the cemetery, past the Trebor sweet factory and down to the banks of the River
Don. There is a veritable forest of fig trees growing along the Don towards the east of the city. The
trees are hardly native. As best anyone can tell, their roots
–
not their literal roots, dear friends
–
are
the fig roll factories that dotted the area. However, used to a Mediterranean climate, the original fig
trees were only able to grow because of the hot water being continually
pumped into the Don by the
riverside steel works. Pak Choi and I did not make it as far as the fig trees but when we do, I always
try to spot any flowers on the trees, just like Dunzfel in the old
Eastern European tale.
The Six Tasks of Dunzfel appears in Langs Lilac Fairy Book. It is one of a broad range of fairy tales in
which the poor protagonist
–
in this case, a young man who wished to marry the princess
–
is forced
to undertake a number of seemingly impossible tasks. In Dunzfels case, the tasks are to fill a barrel
of water from a well using only a sieve, to state the number of hairs on the kings head, to hold his
breath from one year to the next, to collect a posy of a thousand fig flowers, to weave a carpet from
spider
s silk, and to summon all the wolves in the world. Dunzfel achieves most
of these by cunning
I loved this book. So happy it’s getting a tour.
It sounds like good fun!