What We Keep
More than Rumors of War
At a time when our world seems poised on the edge of yet another madness, and the madness is spreading, I thought it would be a fine time to re-read my mother’s classic fairy tale which we just republished in a lovely new edition. A short vacation in Fairyland sounded just right.
But there it was, war again, buried just deep enough not to notice on first glance. My mother wrote Shadow Castle during WWII. (The original 1945 hardcover has the regulation notice about being produced in accordance with government regulations on conservation of paper.) Her husband, my father, was a combat cameraman in the Marine Corps somewhere in the Pacific (Iwo Jima as it turned out). A trip to Fairyland must have seemed to her too like an escape from wondering if he was still alive.
That would have been the most awful part, not knowing. At one point in the book, Mika gives Gloria a magical bracelet to protect her. She puts it on and sees goblins all around her. They don’t seem to be able to get at her but they are clearly there. She takes it off again in a hurry. Then she puts it back on because now that she knows they’re there, she would much rather see them than not. My mother was never a woman not to look a situation in the eye.
There are echoes of the war in the goblins too. They haven’t bothered Fairyland for decades and so everyone relaxed, and set about a life that didn’t involve fighting off invaders. But now suddenly here they are again with their poisoned claws and their sense that they can have anything they want. Goblins are envious, resentful, and certain they are better, stronger, smarter than anyone else and therefore deserve...everything.
The actual tends to follow a writer into the fictional, sometimes without our noticing, in ways large and small. In the story, the fairies’ best defense against the goblins is goblin dust, magical and hard to make. One grain on a goblin’s skin is enough to send it into a frenzy of excruciating pain until it has covered itself with butter, which is rare in the goblin lands. My mother was living with her mother and sister and keeping a household running on ration stamps. Butter was a luxury, strictly rationed and expensive. A child reader in 1945 would get it immediately.
Even with the echoes of war, and two fierce battles between goblins and fairies, she somehow arranged it that no one died, not even goblins — The wizard Glauz enchants them into doorknobs. A child of 1945 would see enough death elsewhere.
I would give a great deal to know that doorknob spell just now.
The original hardback from 1945.
I think about what my mom did in the war, and the concrete reminder I have of that -- she was at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project with my Dad, and I have a turquoise bracelet that she bought while she was there. They were so mysterious before they were our mothers, and any connection is powerful!