The Magic of Fairy Tales (1981, Brimax, retold Lucy Kincaid, illus. Eric Kincaid and Gerry Embleton)
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| The Magic of Fairy Tales Retold by Lucy Kincaid Illustrated by Eric Kincaid and Gerry Embleton © Brimax Rights Ltd. 1976 1978 Published by Brimax Books, Cambridge, England 1981 Printed in Hong Kong ISBN 0 86112 103 1 |
This vintage collection of fairy tales retold by Lucy Kincaid was published by Brimax in 1981, although the copyright dates are 1976 and 1978, likely because the tales are repeated from earlier Brimax collections. There are six fairy tales in the collection, illustrated by Eric Kincaid and Gerry Embleton.
The Magic of Fairy Tales has a pink cover with title in yellow and blue. The front cover is bordered on the left by a beanstalk being climbed by Jack. A fairy godmother or witch (not repeated in the interior illustrations) sits above the title, casting a spell, and beneath the title is a collection of fairy tale characters from the interior illustrations, grouped along a blue frieze. The back cover features a fairy tale house (a copy of an illustration from inside the book – the home of Jack from "Jack and the Beanstalk").
This book is compact, making use of all available space by using the front loose endpaper as the title page and the back endpapers to print the final story in the collection. The front endpapers / title page show a medieval town, with a variety of people going about their business, including a witch on a broomstick and a wizard with a very fine grey beard, out strolling with his cat. The book is paginated, with the final endpaper showing p.31, and the first story starting on the back of the front loose endpaper at p.4, which would make the cover itself page 1. The title page shows a list of the contents:
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| Title page of The Magic of Fairy Tales |
The stories in this collection all appear in other Brimax collections, including the Brimax Omnibus of Fairy Tales.
Puss in Boots
No time is wasted in Kincaid's fast-moving retelling of "Puss in Boots", and everything falls into place like well-oiled clockwork.
The story begins with the miller's third son inheriting his father's cat. The cat, wanting to prove itself useful, asks for a pair of boots and begins to take gifts to the King's palace, claiming they are from the Marquis of Carabas. The story suddenly speeds up when Puss hears the king is taking his daughter for a carriage ride. He quickly arranges for his master to be 'rescued' from the river, for all the local agricultural labourers to say they are working in fields owned by the Marquis, and for the demise of the local ogre so that Puss can claim the ogre's castle for his master.
The story felt rushed to me, as we are in the dark along with the miller's son as to what is happening, and Puss's machinations from the moment of the carriage ride felt more fortuitous than well-planned. His defeat of the ogre is almost instantaneous:
He went straight up to the ogre without so much as a twitching of a whisker, and said, "I hear you can turn yourself into any animal you choose. I won't believe a story like that unless I see it for myself."
When the ogre transforms into a lion and back, Puss says with a shrug, "Must be easy to change yourself into something big," convinces the ogre to become a mouse, and immediately swallows him up.
In terms of illustrations, our first view of the king (when Puss in Boots takes him the first rabbit he caught) makes the royal look like a sleepy Old King Cole. I preferred the image of him looking old but alert as he peers out the carriage window at the agricultural labourers he questions. I also liked the shadowy, layered illustration of the ogre's transformation to a mouse, and the panache of Puss preparing to pounce.
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| Transformation in action: Detail from "Puss in Boots" |
Jack and the Beanstalk
In Kincaid's retelling of this well-known English folk tale, Jack's poverty is emphasised. The opening paragraph states "They were so poor they never seemed to have enough to eat", and when the story ends, it is with the line "They were never poor again."
Kincaid's Jack is no fool. When his mother sends him to sell their cow, Jack recognises that five beans are not worth a cow but thinks five magic beans seems "a good bargain". After his mother scolds him, he realises he's been scammed and determines to take responsibility for his situation: "Jack went sadly to bed, without any supper. He supposed he had been rather silly. He would have to go in search of work the following day for he couldn't let his mother starve."
When he realises he wasn't scammed after all, he decides to go up the beanstalk to see what he can find, despite his mother begging him not to go. Above the clouds, he finds "a land just like his own except that everything in it was twice and three times as big." This Jack is daring and charming: he "knocked boldly" on the door of "the only house he could see" and persuaded the wife of the giant to give him some breakfast. The giant's wife hides him, and when he sees the giant's hen lay a golden egg he decides "to have that hen for himself".
I enjoyed Kincaid's description of Jack moving "[a]s quick as a bee about to sting" to steal the hen and flee. Although he tells his mother this will make them rich, he returns to the house a few days later. This time, when the giant smells Jack, his wife, who now feels cheated, also wants to find him: "I'll help you look for him... If it's the boy who stole our little hen you shall have him for breakfast."
Jack sees the harp, steals it, is chased by the giant, and races him to the bottom where he gets his mother to bring him his axe. "He swung his arms as though he were the strongest man in the world, and with three hefty cuts the beanstalk came tumbling to the ground." The giant's impact makes "a hole so big ... that both he and the beanstalk disappeared into it and were lost forever."
"Jack and the Beanstalk" always strikes me as a tale of pure thievery, and Jack's lack of gratitude to the giant's wife is clear in this retelling. Kincaid's "Puss in Boots" tells us straight up that the ogre Puss tricks is "cruel and wicked", but in "Jack and the Beanstalk" we don't get a straightforward statement about why it's ok to steal from the giant and kill him – I expect we are meant to consider him inherently evil since he likes to eat Englishmen for breakfast.
My favourite illustration in this retelling is of the giant climbing down the beanstalk, carrying his own axe and reaching for Jack. The perspective is fantastic, and perfectly offset by the red bean flowers off to each side.
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| The giant descends the beanstalk: Detail from "Jack and the Beanstalk" |
I also liked the image of the giant's wife, with medieval headdress and chatelaine keys, and appreciated the fine details of the giant's kitchen, particularly the carvings on the furniture.
The Three Spinners
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| The wedding party: Detail from "The Three Spinners" |
The Brave Tin Soldier
I liked the fresh opening line of Kincaid's retelling of this Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale: "Once, someone who was clever, made twenty-five tin soldiers from a single spoon." (The original doesn't consider the maker of the soldiers, just noting that "They were all brothers because they had been made from the same old tin spoon"***).
Two things I did find slightly perplexing in this retelling though: "the toy conjurer" and "the charred tinsel rose". We don't know what a "toy conjurer" is – the story introduces the character with no context, and for a time I wondered if the toy conjurer was the toy maker mentioned at the start of the story. I had to go back to the original to make sense of the story. In my edition of Hans Christian Andersen's complete fairy tales and stories (translated from the Danish by Erik Christian Haugaard) he's described as a "little black troll", a "jack-in-the-box" that jumps out of the "snuffbox".***
Similarly, when the narrator describes how a "charred tinsel rose" lay alongside "the tiny tin heart of the brave little tin soldier" in the ashes of the fire at the end, this makes little sense, as the paper dancer is never described (or illustrated) as wearing a tinsel rose (or, as my edition translates, a "spangle").
I've always found "The Brave Tin Soldier" a rather dismal story – only in death is the steadfast soldier united with the dancer he wishes to be his wife. Of interest, the illustrations show the dancer with her leg out sideways, rather than behind her (which fails to show why the tin soldier thought her one-legged like himself):
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| The paper ballerina: Detail from "The Brave Tin Soldier" |
The Frog Prince
The princess in Kincaid's retelling of "The Frog Prince" doesn't look particularly childlike in the illustrations, but in text she seems very young – she cries when she loses the ball she is playing with, and when it is returned to her she snatches it up and runs away "laughing across the palace lawns", oblivious to all promises. She is "skipping along one of the palace corridors" when the frog comes to claim his promise and when she sees it she runs and hides "behind her father, the King".
She appears quite frightened of the frog and only keeps her promise to be close to him because she is told to do so by her father and is "a dutiful daughter". In the bedroom "she was so afraid that the frog would hop onto the crisp white pillow upon which she lay her own head, that she put him on a chair in the corner of the room and hoped that that would do instead". When the frog threatens to tell her father she has not kept her promise, she throws him across the room towards her bed (not at a wall) and that breaks his enchantment. The story tells us they "were married, of course, and they lived happily ever after in a land where promises were always kept".
The illustrations were lovely, particularly that of the princess staring into the pool. However, I most liked the breakfast spread, and the happy-looking frog savouring the human meal (perhaps his first in a long time!).
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| A froggy breakfast: Detail from "The Frog Prince" |
Choosing a Wife
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| The cheese test: Detail from "Choosing a Wife" |
Summary
This is a fun collection of fairy tales retold by Lucy Kincaid with her usual fresh style and with great illustrations by Eric Kincaid and Gerry Embleton. I couldn't find any copies of this collection available online (I picked mine up at a charity booksale). Luckily, if getting a copyof this book is difficult, the fairy tales can still be read and enjoyed as they appear in identical form in multiple other Brimax collections.
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