"The Pied Piper of Hamelin," by Robert Browning

In which it is important to pay your rodent-exterminating musicians lest he leads your children into a mountain forever, and in which the narrator pretends he has some sense of poetic rhythm.



Hey hey, everyone! One of the creepier classic children's stories out there has always been "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," what with the stealing all the children away and piping and such, so that's this year's choice for our (slightly belated) Halloween story. As I discuss in the probably overlong intro, the story is inspired by a circa 1300 stained-glass church window in the town of Hamelin, Germany, and the earliest written record of the town from 1384 which states "It is 100 years since our children left." The actual cause is unknown (Plague? Drowning? Landslide? Children's crusade? Mass emigration?), as is what the piper represents. He might've been an actual person leading them away (like an emigration recruiter, or a crusade leader), or a symbolic figure of death or the devil. The rats were added to the story a few hundred years later.

1592 painting based on the Hamelin window, which was destroyed in 1660.

 Illustrations and notes after the jump!

"The Tales of Jemima Puddle-Duck, Two Bad Mice, and Mr Jeremy Fisher," by Beatrix Potter

In which more adorable anthropomorphic animals are, respectively, too foolish to be trusted with important stuff, terribly destructive with no negative consequences, and never going fishing again.



I know, I said we were going to start a new book this time around. And we will! But, after posting the last trio of Beatrix Potter stories, an old college friend of mine specifically requested that I read "The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck," presumably for her children (though I'm not one to judge if not). Heck, why not? And, like last time, since they're so short I tossed in a couple of bonus ones as well. So, Kathy, Miri, and Jack, I hope you enjoy. And the rest of you too, I guess.

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck

 

Frontispiece - Jemima thought
him mighty civil and handsome.

"The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, and Benjamin Bunny," by Beatrix Potter

In which adorable anthropomorphic animals are threatened with grisly deaths in a trio of short morality plays involving a variety of produce.



All right, full disclosure, I was planning on reading a totally different story for you this time around, but then I found a beautiful hardcover collection of Beatrix Potter's complete tales and I was all "HOW DID I NOT KNOW BEATRIX POTTER'S STORIES WERE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?" and I decided I had to read some of them. Also, the story I had planned had serious English accents, and that sounded hard.

Anyway, not too much to say that I didn't go over in the intro, except that with these stories ("Peter Rabbit," specifically) Potter essentially invented merchandizing. Very shortly after "Peter Rabbit" was published, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll and board game. A wide variety of officially licensed toys, games, books, decorations, dishes, etc. followed, making her and her publishers a zillion dollars.

Now, Potter's illustrations are just as famous -- if not even more so -- than the actual stories, and they are quite numerous. I'll be splitting them up by story, and much like with the Oz books they're so numerous that time-stamping them is practically pointless, so I won't bother. Heck, even just captioning them I practically copied all of the text. The few notes that I deemed necessary are time-stamped, though, and in their proper places.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit 

 

Frontispiece - His mother put him to
bed, and made some camomile tea;
and she gave a dose of it to Peter!

See the rest after the jump!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Part Two

In which Ichabod thoroughly enjoys himself at the party, up until its disappointing end, and has a fateful encounter on the ride home with a horse-mounted man that may or may not have a head.



It's funny, I'd rather forgotten until re-reading this story for the blog that "Sleepy Hollow" doesn't really have any of what you might call "dialogue" in it. Huh.

Illustrations! As last time, the color illustrations are by F. O. C. Darley, 1849, while the black and white ones are by other artists as noted, from 1863.

Oh, first a note for 2:40: the cedar-bird is referred to as wearing a montero cap, which was a type of Spanish hunting cap from the 1600s that has a band going around the crown that can be folded down to protect the ears and/or face, rather like a balaclava.

3:40 - "The Tappan Zee," by John Frederick Kensett

First, the artist. John Frederick Kensett was one of the most well-known and successful artists in the "second generation" of the Hudson River School.  Perhaps his most well-known and longest-lasting contribution to the art world is less his actual work, and more as one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next, the actual illustration. I probably should've mentioned this last time, but the Tappan Zee is a natural widening of the Hudson River (its widest point, in fact). Its name is taken from the Tappan group of the Lenape tribe, though it's unlikely that's what they called themselves, and the Dutch word "zee," meaning "sea." Several times, the story mentions the bluffs along its edge; these are the basalt cliffs known as the Palisades.

More after the break!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Part One

In which we are introduced to the town of Sleepy Hollow; its itinerant schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane; wealthy coquette Katrina Van Tassel; and local hero and roustabout Brom Bones; and in which we hear of the local superstition of the headless horseman; and Ichabod departs for a dinner party.



New short story! One of the most enduring examples of early American fiction, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was originally published in 1820 as part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of Irving's short works. This book is commonly considered, along with James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales, one of the first works of American literature to be widely read back in Europe. Perhaps even more than anything by Cooper, "Sleepy Hollow" (and Irving's other best-known work, "Rip Van Winkle," also published in The Sketch Book) is one of those stories that has entered the American lexicon. Even those who've never read the story have an idea what you mean when you describe someone as looking like Ichabod Crane, and the image of the Headless Horseman, brandishing his flaming pumpkin aloft, has indelibly etched itself into our collective brain.

The illustrations I've picked out come from two different sources. The color illustrations are by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (more commonly known by F. O. C. Darley, and who can blame him) from an 1849 printing of The Sketch Book. Darley was considered one of the preeminent "genre" illustrators of the mid-1800s, creating watercolors or line illustrations for Irving, Cooper, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Clement C. Moore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many more. The black and white illustrations are from an 1863 edition, and are done by a variety of artists, who will be credited by their respective illustrations. Near as I can tell, only a few of these were actually created specifically to illustrate "Sleepy Hollow;" several are landscapes done by prominent local artists known specifically for, well, landscapes, and not for book illustrations, so I think they were preexisting works pressed into service for this printing. Several of said artists were followers of the Hudson River School of art, which focused on romantic landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding mountains.

Oh, and due to the length of this story, I've broken it into two parts, of which this is obviously the first.

3:21 - "View in Sleepy Hollow," by William Hart (from a sketch by J. H. Hill)

This is one of those landscape works I mentioned.  William Hart was one of those members of the Hudson River School, and was known for his landscapes involving strong angled sunlight, foreground shadow, and cows. He, uh, painted a lot of cows. He is also the maternal grandfather of E. B. "bet I can make you cry over a spider" White. I haven't been able to figure out for sure who J. H. Hill was, but another of the pictures are by Hart from a sketch of his, so maybe he was some sort of assistant?

Much more after the jump!

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair," by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In which a Jazz Age wallflower from Eau Claire gets some good advice from her cousin, who gets upset when it works a little too well, and revenge is had via haircut; and in which you should be thankful that our narrator decided against attempting a Wisconsin accent.



So, as mentioned in the recording, this installment is largely in honor of my AP English teacher, Mr. Denis Linehan, who would put his hand to his heart when he spoke fondly of "Bernice." Yes, he was on a first-name basis with the story. So, Mr. Linehan, wherever you are now (probably at the track), this one's for you.

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first big stories, published in the May 1, 1920 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, making this the most modern work we've featured so far (and, barring any permissions I get from authors, one of the most modern we're likely to feature.) Fitzgerald had published in the Post before, but this marked the first time he got his name on the cover. The cover painting itself has nothing to do with the story, though; it's titled "Ouija," and is by the legendary Norman Rockwell.

More covers and notes after the jump!

"The Little Mermaid," by Hans Christian Andersen

In which the young mermaid from under the sea wishes to be part of our world, makes a bargain with a sea witch, and attempts to win the love of a young prince in order to... get an immortal soul, a part of the story that our narrator had rather forgotten about.



Since "Snow White and Rose Red" was a bit on the short side, we're going to double up on our short story interlude by returning to Mr. Hans Christian Andersen. "The Little Mermaid," one of Andersen's popular "suffering is totally good for you" stories, was originally published in Denmark in 1836 as "Den lille havfrue," which literally translates as... "The Little Mermaid." As with "The Snow Queen" I had to pick a translation. Now, rather than just go with the one in the Andersen collection I own, because it inexplicably doesn't include "The Little Mermaid," which, what? I went with the original English translation from 1872, by H.P. Paull. As with Alice "Mrs. Edgar" Lucas," this is alternatively credited to H.B. Paull, Mrs. H.B. Paull, Mrs. H.H.B. Paull or various combinations thereof, when it seems her name is, in fact, Susannah Mary Paull.

Also, I, um, may have gone a bit overboard with the illustrations on this one. I found one rather extensive set of illustrations I really liked by Helen Stratton from 1899. Those are most of them, and all but one of the black-and-white illustrations. The full-color illustrations are by our friend Edmund Dulac, from the same 1911 edition that our "Snow Queen" illustrations came from. Then there are two others I threw in from Harry Clarke, 1916, and Hans Tegner, largely because I thought the others didn't include nearly enough pictures of the sea witch, who is awesome.

Oh, and it should be noted that whilst the Victorian era was one of rather notorious prudery, they were still kind of okay with breasts in art and illustrations. So... mermaid boobs ahead, if that kind of thing bothers you.

By the way, I apologize that this is late and that I didn't put in any timestamps for the images, but I need to stop pretending I can get these things done on time during tech week for a show I'm in. The theater people in the audience know what I'm sayin'. If I get a chance, I'll add the timestamps in.

The "F" from the opening line: "Far out in the ocean..." (Stratton)

More illustrations after the jump!

"Snow White and Rose Red," by the Brothers Grimm

In which the titular sisters encounter a very nice bear and a very ungrateful dwarf and between them find a happy-ever-after; and in which the narrator insists on demonstrating that he learned SOMETHING in four years of high school German.



And here's our first fairy tale by Grimm! As described at length in the recording, this Snow White is not the same as that of "...and the Seven Dwarves." The names are different in German: Sneewittchen for the more famous one, and Scnheeweißchen* for this one. They both translate literally to "Little Snow White," but the former is Low German and the latter is High German. There is a dwarf in this one, though!

Much like with Andersen and Verne, there are a multitude of translations of Grimm both in and out of the public domain. A translation by Margaret Hunt from the 1870s is considered the definitive English translation of the nineteenth century. It also, however, has not aged especially well. Instead, I'll be using the version used in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition I got for free a while back, which is an anonymous translation from 1869. Maybe not the best, but definitely usable.

I was, though, very pleased with the number of illustrations I was able to find for this somewhat lesser-known tale. I couldn't entirely decide between three sources, so I used them all! One batch is by Jennie Harbour, from a 1921 compilation edited by Edric Vredenburg called My Book of Fairy Tales. Another is by L. Leslie Brooke, from a 1909 book called The House in the Wood and Other Fairy Stories, and the third is by Alexander Zick from a German edition of Grimm's from sometime in the 1880s, probably. Most of the image files are courtesy of SurLaLune Fairy Tales.

2:37 - They were like the flowers which bloomed on two
rose-bushes which grew before the cottage. (Jennie Harbour)

See more illustrations after the jump!

"The Ransom of Red Chief," by O. Henry

In which a perfectly honest kidnapping scheme is ruined by a most obstreperous child, and our narrator is glad to be accenting now in the American South.



William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, published "The Ransom of Red Chief" in The Saturday Evening Post in 1907, and then in his short story collection Whirligigs in 1910. It's since become one of the most well-known short comic stories in American literature, and even if you haven't read it before you've surely seen homages to it countless times without even realizing it.

I mention this in the recording, but I'll repeat it here: be aware that this story contains not only a portrayal of an early 1900s child playacting a Native American in a very early-1900s way, but also contains an actual racial slur. You know the one. It's used in a quick and frankly baffling manner, but it's there.

Now illustrations! As far as I could tell, there aren't any "original" illustrations, or at least none that I could find, so I've got a pair here from the Boy Scouts Book of Stories, published for the Boy Scouts of America by D. Appleton and Company in 1920. The line-drawing "decoration" up at the top of the post headed the story and was done by Arthur D. Scott, and the fully-painted illustration here was by Walter Louderback.

15:13 - The Black Scout jumps on Bill's
back and digs his heels in his side.

A couple of quick notes from the text: at 2:12, we are told that the entire motivating factor behind the kidnapping is to acquire funds for a "town-lot scheme." Near as I can tell, this is essentially the old "got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya" con, where they sell plots of land they don't quite have the rights to. My guess is that the money was to actually purchase a single plot of land and then sell it multiple times to different people.

A moment later, our loquacious narrator uses the wonderful word "philoprogenitiveness," which is the condition of either producing many offspring or of loving one's offspring, either of which would rather work in context.

Last, around 11:02 Bill says that his favorite Bible character is King Herod. This presumably refers not to the King Herod who challenged Jesus to walk across his swimming pool, but rather his father, Herod the Great, who was the King of Judea who, in the Gospel of Matthew, heard that a new "king of the Jews" was to be born in Bethlehem and thus ordered the deaths of all young boys in and around Bethlehem.

And that's it for this short story interlude! Check back soon for the start of our next book.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

"Rikki-tikki-tavi," by Rudyard Kipling

In which a mongoose is found by a family, and defends them against the wicked cobras who live in their garden, and in which our narrator thinks you should just be grateful that the humans were the only ones with attempted British accents.



"Rikki-tikki-tavi" was originally published in 1894 in Kipling's The Jungle Book (which, yes, has more than just the Mowgli stories in it), and is now perhaps most familiar to people of recent generations through the 1975 animated version by Chuck Jones. The book, and thus this story was thoroughly illustrated by Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Despite being a short story, Kipling the Elder illustrated it to nearly Denslowian proportions, so all of them are after the jump.

"The Snow Queen," Fourth to Seventh Stories

In which our heroine is assisted by crows, royalty, a most delightful robber girl, a friendly reindeer, and a couple of mysterious ladies to achieve a happy ending, though several deaths are dealt with rather casually.



Couple of things I had to look up: the poor murdered "postilions" are drivers of horse-drawn carriages; the "lath" enclosing the robber girl's wood pigeons is just strips of wood, like that making latticework; the Snow Queen's castle is on Spitsbergen, a very-far-north island belonging to Norway, and to get there they must travel to Lapland, which is a cultural region defined as where the indigenous Sami people live (the Sami were formerly known, and are referred to in this story, as the Lapp people, which is now frowned upon), and ultimately end up in the Finnmark, a very northerly county in Norway. There, they meet the Finn woman, who naturally enough is a member of the ethnic group associated with Finland.

And then of course we have the rest of the Edmund Dulac illustrations from 1911:

2:20 - "She has read all the newspapers in the world, and forgotten them again, so clever is she."

 One of the things I love about this story is how Gerda gets mixed up in what seem to be someone else's fairy tale entirely, like this one about the clever princess looking for a husband who can prove his worth to her, and Gerda's all "Mmhmm, mmhmm, can we get back to my tragic search now?"

12:29 - "'It is gold, it is gold!' they cried."

Also, I just absolutely adore the little robber girl, like how she takes pity on Gerda and thus earnestly promises that she won't let anyone else kill her, but will do it herself, and how she tries to make Gerda kiss one of the pigeons, and how she casually mentions that the friendly, helpful crow is now dead. She's my favorite.

23:51 - "The reindeer did not dare to stop. It ran on till it came to the bush with the red berries. There
it put Gerda down, and kissed her on the mouth, while big shining tears trickled down its face."

I'm a little puzzled about the fact that the text specifically says that the reindeer — twice — kiss Gerda on the mouth, but hey, who am I to judge.

26:50 - "The Snow Queen sat in the very middle of it when she sat at home."

Funny thing, we actually don't see very much of the Snow Queen. Gerda doesn't even meet her. She sure is purty, though. Actually, all of the villains in this story — the hobgoblin, the Snow Queen, the robbers — all get away completely scot-free. And, of course, millions of other shards of that mirror still exist in the world. Ah well.

And that's it for another short story interlude, and Andersen has now taken his place on The Bookshelf. Tomorrow we'll start up a new book, and then we'll resume our regular schedule. Thanks for listening!


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

"The Snow Queen," First to Third Stories

In which a demon's mirror freezes a young boy's heart, allowing him to be abducted by the eponymous Snow Queen, at which point his young friend Gerda sets out to find him, only to be waylaid by a beautiful garden.



For this short story interlude, I thought that, in honor of the opening of Disney's Frozen, I would read the story that (very) loosely inspired it: "The Snow Queen," by Hans Christian Andersen. Originally published in Danish in 1845, this specific translation was done by Alice Lucas (aka "Mrs. Edgar Lucas," or "Mrs. E. V. Lucas") in approximately 1900. It's not necessarily the best or the most definitive translation, but it is the one I happen to own, and it's also in the public domain, so it's the one I'll be going with.

As one of Andersen's most highly regarded stories (as well as one of his longest), it's garnered quite a number of illustrations over the years. I'm going to go with those by Edmund Dulac, used in a 1911 collection of Andersen's works that used Mrs. Lucas's translation and which is available at Project Gutenberg.

1:31 - "One day he was in a high state of delight because he had invented a mirror with this
peculiarity, that every good and pretty thing reflected in it shrank away to almost nothing."

5:52 - "Many a winter's night she flies through the streets and peeps in at the windows,
and then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful patterns like flowers."

16:57 - "Then an old, old woman came out of the house; she was leaning upon a big, hooked
stick, and she wore a big sun hat, which was covered with beautiful painted flowers."

A quick note about pronunciation, for those wondering: in most translations, the little boy's name is spelled "Kai," which is presumably pronounced to rhyme with "tie." Mrs. Lucas's translation, though, spells it "Kay," which I don't think I can make myself read in any other manner than to rhyme with "hay." So, sorry about that.

As it turns out, "The Snow Queen" is a rather long short story, so it will be broken up into two parts. The next one will go up tomorrow (a day early, to catch up on the days I missed recently, woo!)

Also, how's everyone like the new mic? Sexy, yeah? Or am I the only one who can hear a difference?


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

"The Black Cat," by Edgar Allan Poe

In which there is a descent into Murderous Madness, facilitated by the eponymous Black Cat, as well as the Demon "Alcohol," and in which our narrator affects a "Spooky Manner."



To the best of my knowledge, the works of Edgar Allan Poe don't have any definitive illustrations, like Alice or Sherlock, or even any "original" ones, like Anne, but he does have the advantage of over 160 years of influencing literary history, and by extension artists of many stripes. Here are a few quick public domain "Black Cat" illustrations/artworks I found:

 This etching was done by Alphonse Legros, a French artist who did a series of these etchings around 1861 to illustrate Charles Baudelaire's French translations of Poe's works.

 This one, done by English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley in 1901, is in a very different style, inspired more by Japanese woodcuts. It does, though, show essentially the same scene, the same that most people choose to illustrate from the story: the climactic reveal of the cat atop the head of the narrator's dead wife.

This painting, though, is inspired by the story but not intended to illustrate it. Gino Severini painted this in 1911, and one can make out important aspects of the story if you look closely enough. The cat, of course, both before and after eye-gouging, but also the glass filling with wine, showing what Poe intended be the real monster of the story.

(Although the guy with the axe is also kind of the monster.)


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

"A Scandal in Bohemia," by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In which Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson engage in Royal Intrigue, and in which our narrator promptly forgets his forswearing of British Accents, acquitting himself "Passably," yet manages a German accent "Most Atrociously," or "Perhaps Russian?"



Sidney Paget's illustrations are not quite as well-known anymore as John Tenniel's ones for Alice, but they still helped create the visual image of Holmes that continues to this day: