Delayed, but finally here!

This year, DANCE your way to Valentine’s Day! Novels based on fairytales and folktales featuring dance.

In preceding years (you can find all the posts archived on my blog, btw–just look for February!), I have posted novels based on worldwide fairytales and folk tales, and on two “literary” fairytales (Cinderella and Rapunzel). This year, I’m featuring a whole week of novels based on fairytales and folktales involving dance. Here are the posts:

Day One of Fairytale Fantasy Week: Entwined, by Heather Dixon–a novel based on the classic fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.

Day Two: Midnight in Everwood, by M. A. Kuzniar–a novel based on the story behind the classic fairytale ballet, The Nutcracker. Find the review here.

Day Three: Valentine’s Day itself! The amazing fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke–a novel with a strong dancing subplot. ONE OF MY TWO FAVORITES. Find the review here.

Day Four: House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A. Craig–another novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.

Day Five: Dark Breaks the Dawn, by Sara B. Larson–a novel based on the fairytale ballet Swan Lake. Find the review here.

Day Six: Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson–a final choice based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” but be warned–it’s nothing like the others. ONE OF MY TWO FAVORITES. To see the review, go here.

TODAY, Day Seven: A wrap-up and a discussion of the “dance mania” or “dance plagues” that swept medieval Europe. These episodes are behind some of the era’s most interesting folklore, including fairytales we still enjoy. (and a free download of my Pied Piper-inspired story, if you want to read it.)

THE WRAP-UP:

As I explored fairytale fantasy novels using dance as a theme, these were my two main takeaways:

• The fairytale usually called “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is an especially powerful inspiration for these novels.
• Other novels of fairytale fantasy take the stories behind several well-known ballets for inspiration–sort of a no-brainer if you’re looking to combine fairytale fantasy and dance. And this is also not a surprise: most of the ballets were choreographed to the music of Tchaikovsky, who may be most famous for his fairytale-themed ballets.
• Of the six novels I reviewed, my two favorites share a crossover appeal for readers of “literary” fiction. That’s no accident, since I am one of those readers. I also really love good genre fiction–but it has to be good (in the writing, the overall conception of the story, and the way it presents itself to readers) for me to like it. THIS MAY NOT BE YOUR EXPERIENCE. Plenty of readers who love fairytale fantasy want the full-bore genre reading experience, akin in the world of books to opening a big luscious box of chocolates and digging in. Hey, I love that, too! I also love other types of reading experiences.

Full disclosure about that last item. I’m a retired English prof. So I WOULD be like that, right? But I crave immersing myself in an amazing alternate world, so I love all types of books (and other media) that do that for me. And, like all readers, I have my prejudices (such as hating cliff-hanger endings).

Here’s another important matter: I love reading books, talking about books, even analyzing books (which–if you’re not careful–can spoil the pleasure. “We murder to dissect.”). WRITING books is another thing entirely. I do that, too, and I never underestimate how hard that is. I’m in awe of all six of the authors of the books I’ve posted about in this blog series. I think of myself as a good reader. I TRY to be a good writer, and how well I succeed. . . that’s up for grabs.

On to the fascinating topic of WHY we love fairytales (folk tales) and therefore why, if we love reading fantasy, fairytale fantasy might especially speak to us.

Because my theme this year has been dance, I concentrated in this series of blog posts on folklore about dance and how it transforms into fairytale magic. Here are two important pieces of dance-related folklore, one well-known and one pretty obscure:

The Sur La Lune website has posted a detailed discussion of the Brothers Grimm version of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” also known as “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces,” and comments on several others. I won’t duplicate the fine work of that web site, but I’ll direct you over there. If you’re fascinated by fairytales, this site is a wonderful resource.

That great resource Wikipedia gives an extremely helpful list of the many versions world-wide of this fairytale.* And as I’ve already mentioned, entering something like “novels based on The Twelve Dancing Princesses” into your favorite search engine will lead you to many lists of great books to read. I found it a real struggle to narrow this blog’s investigation to six novels.

The second, much less well-known folk tale is the German tale “The Dancers,” or more often, “The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf.” It tells of an angry abbot who upbraids his parishioners because they dance on the Sabbath, profaning the holy day. When they won’t clean up their act, the abbot curses the sinful villagers to “dance for a year and a day.” The hapless villagers begin to dance. After dancing through the year and a day of the abbot’s curse, they discover they can’t stop. For years they dance, before finally dropping down exhausted. They spend the rest of their lives in a state of hopeless lethargy. So there, profane dancers.

This tale is related to–or maybe the same tale as–“The Cursed Dancers of Colbeck,” which is known from an early fourteenth century English “exemplum” or cautionary tale about the consequences of disrespecting the Sabbath. (It’s apparently part of an text transmitted by Robert Mannyng, maybe derived from an even earlier mid-thirteenth century text by William of Waddington, but I’d have to go to a university library to find out more). If this exemplum is the origin of the “Dancers of Ramersdorf” tale, that tale wouldn’t be a true folk tale, I guess, but a folk derivation from a literary source. Maybe it’s the reverse! Any folklorists who know about this, please comment! There are some real similarities with some versions of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” too, in which the princesses are cursed to dance.

Whatever scholars find out about these tales, I see some interesting connections between “The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf” and the medieval phenomenon known as “dancing mania,” or “the dance plagues.” Whole towns and villages were caught up in an hysteria that led them to dance to exhaustion and then, supposedly, to death. Many scholars have speculated on the causes, everything from food poisoning to diseases such as epilepsy to mass hysteria. Here is a good account of modern scholars’ thinking about the phenomenon.

“The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf”–and the dance mania–also seems to intersect neatly with other folkloric depictions of dance in the European Middle Ages, mainly visual, that are associated with the Black Plague, the epidemic of bubonic plague that swept Europe most notably in 1346-1353, killing a third to a half of the European population and causing widespread social disruption. Bubonic plague returned multiple times, doing even more damage. (By comparison, think of the social disruptions caused by the recent covid-19 pandemic, multiply that many times, and add in ignorance of the causes of disease in a pre-scientific age, almost no effective medical remedies, and widespread fear and panic. . .hmm, not sounding so different after all.) Drastic social disruptions give rise to stories, games, songs, common if unsubstantiated beliefs, particular objects–folklore, in other words. In our day, such cultural phenomena are frequently not passed down generation to generation by word of mouth, as in traditional folklore, so in technologically advanced societies, we might use the term “urban myth” or “popular culture” instead.

This article sums up the connection between the “dancing mania” and “dancing plagues” of the medieval period in Europe and the Black Death epidemics sweeping Europe around the same time.

The mass deaths of the Black Plague and other medieval outbreaks of bubonic plague had a profound effect on the way people thought about death. One reaction was to see death as a “great leveler.” High and low, rich or poor, it didn’t matter. The plague took you and killed you. The visual arts depicted these anxieties through the “dance of death” or “danse macabre,” a skeleton representing Death leading a line of people of all sorts and stations through a grisly dance–and through visual art that served as mementi mori (mementos, or reminders of death)–not only paintings and etchings, but even skulls set in the midst of fancy banquet tables to remind everyone, “from dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.” Our society tends to hush up and lock away this reality of the human condition, but in the plague years, death and its terrible sights and sounds and smells were all too evident.

Because I can’t resist. . .

For my own purposes as a writer, I couldn’t help but be struck with the similarities of these dance tales and images with another very well-known folk tale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Although the main focus is on music, the idea of marching people off to death, or to some horrifying unknown fate, seems connected to the dance plagues. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s famous twentieth-century film The Seventh Seal provides a great image of the Dance of Death, for example, especially the way Death leads the dead off in a macabre dancing row to their fate. Here’s the link.

The Pied Piper in the folk tale may present a similar image of death. This article sums that idea up nicely. In the tale, a piper (bard) is hired to rid the town of rats. When the town fathers cheat him of his fee, the Pied Piper leads their children off, and they’re never seen again. Here is a good account of the tale and the possible reasons behind it. Two things fascinate me about the Pied Piper tale: first, the backdrop of the tale, during the time of the Black Death, bubonic plague caused by rats. Read about it here. Second, the connection of the plague with rats and with bards. Read here about why bards were often considered so dangerous, and how the Pied Piper story connects with the superstitions about bards, especially the idea that bards were able to rhyme and sing rats away from towns and crops—a kind of musical pest-control service.

A SIDE NOTE: I should mention one final item of folklore, the children’s game Ring Around the Rosie (Roud folk song index #7925). As it turns out, this traditional singing-dancing-rhyming game has nothing to do with the Black Death, despite the popular belief. In the twentieth century, many thought it must be connected. You still see people asserting this. Until I looked into it myself, I thought so, too. In spite of some seemingly convincing arguments about sounds in the Ring Around the Rosie rhyme mimicking sneezing, the “rosy” rash of the plague, the “ashes, ashes” line, and the “all fall down” line, contemporary folklorists mostly reject the Black Plague origins of the rhyme. Read this for an accessible discussion of their thinking.

WHAT DOES THIS FOLKLORE STUFF MEAN FOR US FANTASY READERS, THOUGH?

Fairytales–folk tales–have always been a way for people to come to grips with the human condition. Storytelling itself is a way to do that, maybe the oldest way in the history of humanity. Folk tales like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and “The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf” are entertainment, but they are also conduits into a deeper understanding of our lives. Perhaps, for us, fairytale fantasy novels perform that function. We can breeze through them in a state of delight. We can look deeper. Our choice.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR ME AS A WRITER? A vast well of fascinating characters and plots and ideas. If you’d like to download a free example loosely based on the Pied Piper folk tale, GO HERE.

* About Wikipedia: no sneering about Wikipedia from this writer! Sure, it has its problems, but so does any general encyclopedia. The best feature of Wikipedia is the way its general discussion provides you with sources to go deeper into a subject. (If you’re a student, just don’t copy straight out of Wikipedia, or even with a few tweaks to the language–both are plagiarism–and do go further than Wikipedia. No general encylopedia should function as a student’s main source. See my avoiding-plagiarism guide here–all the more important in a world already flooded with AI. And by the way–if any students are reading this, DO NOT use this blog as a scholarly source. Because it’s not. Maybe it will lead you to some, though.)