Welcome, everyone, to the first edition of my Retelling Reviews! For those of you who don’t know, I will be writing my dissertation on fairy tale retellings, and even though I’m a little more than a year away from starting my dissertation officially, I am already beginning to work on a methodology that will help me analyze books and other media based on fairy tales. Since this month’s fairy tale is “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” I thought I would kick things off by revisiting one of my favorites: East by Edith Pattou. This time, as I read, I annotated the book and took down data that I hope will be useful to my analysis later on. I’m sharing some of that with you here, so this review will look a bit different from my other book reviews!
To start off, I stayed up way too late last night making a fun infographic detailing some of the elements of both the tale and the novel. Check it out!
Now, Let’s Break it Down!
Panel 1: East was written by Edith Pattou and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2003. The target audience is young adults and the genre is fantasy. It was 122 chapters and 476 pages.
Panel 2: The tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 425A and was collected in Norway by Asbjørnsen and Moe in 1845.
Panel 3a – POV: The book is written in 1st Person and has 5 POV characters. 3 of these characters are men (Neddy, Father, and the White Bear) and 2 are women (Rose and the Troll Queen). 50 chapters are narrated by male characters and 72 are narrated by women, creating a proportion of 41% Men to 59% Women. However, broken down by page, we see that 155 pages are narrated by men and 321 are narrated by women, creating a proportion of 33% Men to 67% Women. It is interesting, and I believe important, to note that the story both begins and ends with the narration of a man, excepting the prologue, for which the identity of the narrator is unspecified.
Panel 3b – Elements of Folklore: The following elements of folk tradition and folklore are prominent throughout the book: material culture, vernacular vs. orthodox religion, verbal art, transmission of tradition, Rule of Three, and references to ATU Types 510B and 425A.
Panel 4a – Narrative Proportion: I measured narrative proportion by counting paragraphs in the tale found here. I divided this into the three major parts of the story (bear arrives, girl lives in castle and breaks taboo, girl goes on quest). For the novel, I measured narrative proportion by page, using the same three parts. The narrative proportion between the tale and the novel are almost identical, with only 7% of the novel being appended to account for the characters’ journey home.
Panel 4b – Details: The three old women in the folktale were replaced with a mother/daughter pair, a drunk sailor, and a female Inuit shaman in the novel. The golden apple, golden spinning wheel, and golden carding comb in the tale were replace by a chess piece, a leiderstein (compass), and a story knife in the novel. The four winds from the tale did not appear in the book, but instead, an element from ATU 510B appeared (three dresses made of gold, silver, and moonlight).
ANALYSIS
My hypothetical categorization of East is “Retelling” (a goal of this project is to more precisely define retellings, adaptations, reimaginings, and so forth). I have chosen this category because of the adherence to narrative proportion, the contemporary motivations of the characters, and the precision of detail both retained and substituted.
While there are elements of the novel worth critiquing, such as the emphasis on male characters, overall I find this to be an exquisite example of a fairy tale retelling. It appeals to a 21st century audience while still retaining the setting and narrative features of the folktale. The inclusion of so many folkloric elements in the novel helps reinforce this.
My analysis will only improve with more data, which I’ll acquire by reading more fairy tale retellings and looking for similar information, but for now I think this project is off to a great start and I’m looking forward to seeing what else I will uncover!
Sarah Viehmann 