I’m happy to help those stuck at home during this truly unprecedented time by making my fantasy fairy-tale retelling, Mistress of the Wind, free for five days on Amazon, until March 29th. For those who are familiar with the fairy tale Mistress of the Wind is based on, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, read on for my thoughts on how I took the original tale and worked it into a retelling.
For those who don’t know anything about East of the Sun, West of the Moon, you might find some slight spoilers in my article below, but you can always read Mistress of the Wind and then come back and read it.
Writing Mistress of the Wind
I always loved fairy tales as a child, but when I was at university, doing research for a history paper on the witch hunts of the 17th Century, I came across a really interesting (but totally unrelated :)) journal full of articles on the meanings of fairy tales that reignited that love.
I suddenly saw the subversion in the tales. Even with the whitewashing that went on in the Victorian era to make fairy tales moral tales and warnings, especially to girls, to be good, and obedient and incurious, I realized one could read a subtext to the tale.
I then went on to read books on the interpretation of fairy tales by Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise Van Franz and others, and books like Clarissa Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves, and I found an even deeper love for the tales. Or rather, I finally understood why I loved them so much. I think I’d subconsciously understood the deeper layers, but now I could trace those layers better.
I started thinking about writing a book based on one of my favorite fairy tales, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and ended up weaving some other myths through the tale, to create the story that is Mistress of the Wind. I worked hard to keep it as a tale on a number of levels, just like the original.
It can be about a woman who meets an enchanted prince, falls in love with him and then, when a combination of the circumstances of his enchantment and her actions cause him to be taken from her, she goes on a long search to find and rescue him, getting help from people along the way. Or it could be about a woman coming into her power, and mastering the facets of her personality and understanding her faults and her strengths so that she is able to take on anything that is thrown at her with a clear idea of her worth.
The challenge with Mistress of the Wind, given I wanted to remain true to the original fairy tale, was to give Astrid a good reason to go against Bjorn’s request to see him as a man, which is the catalyst for her having to go on her quest.
The consequences of her doing so are huge, to both her and Bjorn, and I really had to create a compelling situation for her to act against his wishes. If she doesn’t do it, however, the story is over, and the heroine and hero remain trapped in an unhealthy, untenable situation.
I used a number of motivations.
The first was genuine curiosity. Astrid wants to see Bjorn as a man. Of course she does. He is her lover and which of us wouldn’t want to know what the person we love looks like? Her mother’s fear of what he is also spurs that. She wants to be able to reassure her mother that the man she has chosen is not a monster.
Bjorn himself has some responsibility. He could have taken Astrid to his palace and left her alone. But by involving her, drawing her into the complexities of the curse and forming the strong bond that he does with her, he blunts the importance of her never seeing him as a man. Of course, we understand his loneliness and his love for her makes staying away almost impossible, but it is a choice he makes.
Astrid’s personality plays a roles as well. She knows she is worthy of respect, if not love, just for being who she is, and so she has fought against her father’s attempts to beat her down and break her. That makes it extremely hard for her to accept some of the conditions that are set on her behaviour by her lover.
While she fights against the literal, and figurative, burying of her personality and her need to be free–because that’s what her imprisonment in the heart of a mountain amounts to–she tries to accommodate Bjorn’s need for her to never see him as a man, to stay inside, to stay in the dark, but it is eating away at her.
Even though Bjorn tells Astrid that the conditions of his enchantment are the only reason he holds her back, she sees what he cannot, that his enchanter, the troll queen, is merely using the conditions she’s imposed as a way to manipulate Bjorn. She has no intention of letting Bjorn win, and if he does–despite the difficult rules and conditions of the curse–she will have nothing to lose by reneging on their agreement. As an outsider to the situation, Astrid is clearer-eyed than Bjorn. He is playing by the rules, but Astrid has seen evidence the troll queen is not.
Astrid only breaks the enchantment conditions out of concern for Bjorn’s life–what do the rules mean if he is dead, after all?–but she also realizes that continuing on as they are is a slow death. She is proactive, and she wants to act. To fight rather than wait at someone else’s pleasure, for something she is sure will never be granted, no matter if she and Bjorn follow the conditions or not. The consequences of that act drive the second part of the book, where Astrid has to confront her faults and her power, and decide how to control them.
It was a fine line to walk and one which continually challenged me.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
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DARK MATTERS . . . taking matters into her own hands
