Rumpled by Rumplestiltskin

So if anyone is reading this and hasn’t seen all of “Once Upon a Time” season one, SPOILER ALERT! 

You have been warned.

Moving on. So, in ABC’s “Once Upon a Time,” Rumplestiltskin is this evil little dude who plays the grand master of bad magic in fairy tale land. Right now I’m not sure whether or not Rumple is a sorcerer or some odd magical creature. I tend to think of sorcerers as being human and having fantastical magic abilities. However, Rumplestiltskin was human before he had magic. It was only once he killed a man to obtain magical powers that he became this kind-of half human beast.

Generally what I am pondering is the definition of a sorcerer or wizard or warlock. Does someone/thing like Rumplestiltskin fall under the category of warlock if the magic he has is the thing that is altering his humanity. What does a sorcerer look like? I’ve already touched on this a bit with witches –who I think of in terms of Halloween. A witch is green skinned and has warts and is ugly, but is definitely some kind of human woman.  Is a sorcerer always going to be human in appearance?

 I think that a sorcerer has to be human in the sense that the only thing separating them from the average Joe is their magic. For Rumplestiltskin though, his magic is the only thing separating him from a man, but it alters his appearance to the point where he doesn’t really look human anymore. He actually takes on that Halloween witch green skin and warts. Is the way a conjurer looks important in terms of separating them from a superhero or god?

If Rumplestiltskin is a sorcerer, then he also reaffirms what I believe about sorcerers drawing magic from the realm rather than being a source of magic for it. So far, in everything that I’ve read the sorcerer gets his power from the magical beings around him. This is true for Rumple in fairy tale land. In order to have power, he needs to strike new deals with the beings of the realm and trick them into giving him things to fuel his magic. One excellent example of this is when he uses hair from Prince Charming and Snow White to bottle true love (which is the most powerful…yadda yadda). Something like a fairy –say the blue fairy from this series- does not need to do this. She gives magic to the realm. 

If I was going to write a book about vampires and say that they are magical creatures, I wouldn’t need to include any other magical creature but the vampire in my book. This is not the pattern that I am seeing with wizards. They come with other magical creatures included. I think it might be necessary for them to draw power from the greater power of a realm of magical creatures.

Sleeping Beauty and the White Witch

I have recently been watching Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” in order to get a better look at Maleficent. Maleficent plays the evil villain, Hell-bent on ruining the lives of everyone in the kingdom because no one loves her or invites her to parties. Anyway, she is a very dark character in multiple ways, but what I was focused on specifically is how she looks. Visually speaking, she wears all black –with a bit of violet on the inside of her cloak. The cloak itself is shredded at the ends and has this sort-of hood thing that spirals up into devil horns. The fire that she conjures in a rage is green, rather than blue or red (which I think might seem a bit too light or calm in color for her evil self). She is a complete contrast to the heroine, who lives in a bright happy world and has sunshine hair.  Why make her this way?

Maleficent is not ugly. She is tall and thin and has a fair face. Her hands are actually quite beautiful to watch, and they appear perfectly manicured. Her movements are graceful, I didn’t notice that she ever moved in a way that seemed hurried. Even when she snaps up her arms to conjure a spell to stop the escaping Prince Philip, her cloak makes the movement fluid.  My point here is that Maleficent is no ugly hag, but I am repelled by her anyway.

So. What the heck does a witch look like, and why do we have so many negative connotations associated with the word witch? Even the word warlock doesn’t inspire as much fear as the word witch.

Also, what is up with fairies? I started thinking about “Sleeping Beauty” and how the counter magic to Maleficent’s evil magic is that of the three good fairies. Why is that? The Wizard of Oz is guilty of playing a fairy against a witch too. In the new popular T.V. series “Once Upon a Time” the only characters who wield good magic in opposition to the magic of the evil queen and Rumplestiltskin are fairies (the blue fairy from “Pinocchio” being the leader of these). Even cartoons are guilty of this mix. “Winx Club,” a popular cartoon series that has been around since 2004, is about a group of young fairies who fight evil and (at least in first season) are hampered by their witchy counterparts.

I started to look into this a little more and found that some scholars believe that fairies are a sort-of feminine precursor to witches. In old lore, fairies are sometimes known as white witches or good witches. One of the most popular medieval witches, Morgana of the Arthurian legends, is also often referred to as Morgan le Fey. Translated this means Morgan of the fairies.

So what is a witch then? We think of fairies as being something entirely different from wizards or sorcerers. If a witch is a fairy gone bad, can a witch also be the opposite of a wizard? Would their magic be something totally different? Is this all just some crazy amount of sexism?

Wizards Alone?

Storm Front by Jim Butcher is the next book on my list, and I definitely recommend it. For those who may be unfamiliar with the plot, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden is a wizard. He is also a detective, and right now he has to help the police figure out how two people have been murdered by having their hearts blown out from the inside. There is definitely some black magic going on, and everyone thinks that Harry is the killer.

Butcher has this little book packed with action, and with explanations of magic and all things wizardly. There are so many really good explanations throughout this book about how magic works. “Magic is created by life, and most of all by the awareness, intelligence, emotions of a human being” (Butcher, 18). “Those who deal in magic learn to see the world in a slightly different light than everyone else. You gain a perspective you had never considered before, a way of thinking that would just never have occurred to you without exposure to the things a wizard sees and hears” (Butcher, 35). There are explanations on magical practices, like the power behind a name (page70), or the power behind circles (71). The use of blood in magic (71) and what a third eye is and what it does (314) are also included.

My favorite passage here, though, is Butcher’s explanation for the difference between wizards and normal people: “Wizardry is really about thinking ahead, about being prepared. Wizards aren’t really superhuman. We just have a leg up on seeing things more clearly than other people, and being able to use the extra information we have for our benefit. Hell, the word wizard comes from the same root as wise. We know things. We aren’t stronger or faster than anyone else. We don’t even have that much going in the mental department. But we’re god-awful sneaky, and if we get the chance to get set for something, we can do some impressive things” (Butcher, 171). Long passage, but the point is that we can relate to wizards because they aren’t that much different from us.

They do see different things from us though. They can see trolls and goblins and other wizards which go relatively unnoticed by us, and they can apparently look into your soul if they gaze into your eyes. This book is the first on my list that has really been set in the modern world. Tolkien was medieval all the way and Rowling separated her wizarding world to make it feel less modern, but Butcher puts Dresden right in the middle of a society we understand. They are in our world. What is interesting to me about this is that even though Dresden is in our world, so are all of these other magical creatures. Butcher didn’t just insert wizards; he inserted an entire subculture of magical beings. In Harry Potter, Rowling also doesn’t have just wizards and witches. Is it necessary then, for practitioners of magic to be accompanied by their own magical culture. Can they stand alone?

Ah. What's In A Name?

Sorcerer. Wizard. Witch. What in the heck do these words even mean? Are they titles given to those who have worked hard to study the magical arts, or are they labels for beings we are too afraid of not to give a name to?

I actually do not care much for J.K. Rowling’s celebrated Harry Potter series. I didn’t like it as a kid and my opinion hasn’t been reformed for having read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for a third time now. Everyone keeps trying to convince me that the series is so great and J.K. Rowling is such a wonderful writer. It’s not that I dislike her writing…okay well maybe it is a little bit of that. What can I say? I never liked Charles Dickens either. Putting everything that annoys me personally aside though, I believe that there are several things that Rowling does really well with this story.

First of all she defines the extremely complicated concept of magic in terms that a child could understand. She takes the medium of school (something that I will argue here that most people have been tortured with) and makes it fantastical. The typical history class is now the history of magic class –and what child wouldn’t think that was cool. Potions = chemistry class. Flying lessons would be something like gym, etc. Secondly, she makes magic less scary through the idea of education and the tool of the magic wand. In Harry’s world wizards aren’t just wandering around waving wands without any clue what they are doing. All witches and wizards receive an education, and can therefore, practice magic responsibly. Then there is the magic wand. Without a wand the wizard is unable to practice spells –rendering them basically human. (The first book doesn’t get much into the ministry of magic, so I won’t touch it here. But as a limitation on magic it is also important to my point.)

My absolute favorite thing that J.K. Rowling does for magic is exploring the concept of the fear of the unknown or the nameless. Witches and wizards have been feared for centuries because science and general reasoning cannot define magic. People are scared of them because they can’t quite explain what they are. This same concept goes along with any humanoid mythical creature you might want to name: vampire, werewolf, demigod. Yet, we still think that they are cool. Ex: TWILIGHT (yes I went there), Teen Wolf, Hercules.

We are afraid of vampires, yes? But are we all afraid of sparkly Edward Cullen? I’m not really trembling over here. Are we afraid of the Disney movie Hercules? Not a chance, we can go the distance. And we aren’t really afraid of Merlin or Harry Potter either. But we ARE afraid of A vampire; of A sorcerer. Voldemort is a kind of tool for this. “He who must not be named” is terrifying before we ever meet him because he is without a name. He is undefined and without limitation. As Dumbledore says to Harry, “Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself” (298). Perhaps this is the reason that the name/term “wizard” even exists at all.

I See What You Did There, J.R.R.

When people talk about magic they talk about Tolkien, so naturally I chose The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring as the first stop on my magical quest. I read Fellowship many years ago (over ten at any rate) and as my memory is not as sparky as it used to be I decided to read it again. This turned out to be quite a good thing, as I might never have noticed otherwise how similar Tolkien’s introduction into Middle Earth is to medieval histories (which I have since been exposed to).

If you aren’t a super-nerd for medieval literature like me, let me explain what makes Tolkien tick. He has, in the first fourty pages of his text, miles of names and pedigrees and vassals and lands owned and all that jazz. Welcome to the feudal system and a world where names are REALLY important. Listing lots of names of supposedly important people, that there is no way for the reader to remember because they aren’t vital to the story, is a thing I have seen many medieval authors do. Next, welcome to weapons who are just as important as people. Tolkien does not neglect to mention the name of Bilbo’s sword. The last I will list is a really important one, welcome to the author purposefully inserting their voice and bias on you. Those comments on the Red Book and Bilbo’s bias are really interesting.  On page 34 of my edition, “Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions.” Tolkien goes on to note that Gandalf never believed Bilbo, implying that the audience should trust Gandalf and should be wary of bias, as this is a historical text. He is also implying that we should trust the author because he has looked for other versions of the tale besides the Red Book.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain is the first thing that I thought of when I read Tolkien’s prologue. While I haven’t had exposure to the entirety of The History of the Kings of Britain I have been exposed to a very interesting piece of it regarding King Arthur. The legendary king, who may or may not be real, is a subject that Geoff really gets in to (becoming more and more obviously biased in favor of King Arthur as this section of the text goes on). At one point he states, “…there were added from the island of Britain alone, sixty thousand armed men. But the kings of the other islands, since they were not accustomed to have cavalry, pledged infantry as each one was obliged, so that from the six islands…one hundred and twenty thousand were enrolled” (Monmouth, The Romance of Arthur, 79). These numbers (adding up to Arthur’s AMAZING army) are preposterous for the time period. I don’t know if that many people existed then, but it would certainly be hell gathering them all in to one place if they did. Mr. of Monmouth continues to insert his voice into the story, getting so worked up when Guinevere cheats on Arthur that he, “will not speak about this” (Monmouth, 91).

Geoff is an early 12^th century writer, but he isn’t the only medieval writer to write a true history in this manner. Wace, another 12^th c. author, wrote a spectacular history on King Arthur that he several times assured me is true. “I do not want to translate his book since I do not know how to interpret it. I do not want to say anything untrue” (Wace, 99). This coming just after a passage about dragons “foaming, with flames shooting out of their mouths.”

Tolkien is trying really hard to make this text authentically feel like it could be medieval. I am wondering if he really needs to. Does this world need to be old in order to be believable? And more importantly to my research, does magic need to be set in the old world to be believable? Even Harry Potter is set apart from the muggle world in a medieval castle. They use quills and ink. Can magic and science exist together?

  To conclude: I have no idea yet, but I would like to give a shout out.

Dear Tolkien,

 I see what you did there. But was it really necessary?

 Respect,

~ Sarah

All quotes from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The Histories of the Kings of Britain and Wace’s Roman de Brut were taken from :

The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994.