Growing up, my sister and I played "let's pretend" quite frequently. One of our more common adventures involved us dressing up in an odd assortment of costumes; arming ourselves with toy daggers, swords, and bows and arrows; and setting off into the world to rescue people from the forces darkness. One of us would usually be carrying the Inexplicable Baby.
The Inexplicable Baby was a baby doll that would be wrapped up in a sling and secured to the back of one of us warrior women. The baby was inexplicable because we never excactly explained in our stories who she (always a she) was. Sister, daughter, or foundling orphan--it never really mattered. All that was important was that we had been entrusted with the care of this baby, and took her with us even when we were slaying dragons and rescuing princes from witches and pirates.
I am not sure which came first, these games or my love of fairytales that involved the plot device of girl meets prince, girl loses prince, girl saves prince from fate worse than death. I know that my earliest memory of such a fairytale was Beauty and the Beast from Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book. There are many versions of this tale, though they all follow the same basic framework. One of my favorite illustrated versions is the Mercer Mayer version, though I have never owned a copy. The watercolors are lovely and haunting. I guess I share Terri Windling's feeling on the Disney rendition of the tale. As Disney films go, it was delightfully refreshing, but some of the changes they made to the basic story irked me. Ah well, what can you expect? Not only does Disney rework every story they get ahold of, but fairytales themselves usually have multiple versions.
The next tale of this genre that I remember encountering was East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The book that my family owned was the Mercer Mayer story. Again, the illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. He alters the traditional Norwegian tale, substituting the white bear for a frog, amalgamating the tale with that of "The Frog Prince". I think it works well, and I simply adore the depiction of the trolls and the salamander.
As I got older, I discovered the ballad of Tam Lin. This certainly is a tale with many variations! I am always on the lookout for a good musical or fiction adaptation of it. I recently read and enjoyed both Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne-Jones. I also was able to listen to a recording of Tam Lin by Steeleye Span.
Contrary to what some would have you think, there are quite a few fairytales with women taking the lead. I don't mean just modern re-telling, either. While I was looking around at some of these today, I rediscovered Mary Culhane and the Dead Man. This is a wonderfully gruesome tale that I heard on an audio tape from the public library when I was about ten. It had been so long since I had heard it, that I could only remeber a few details. It took several Google searches to find it, but I eventually scored with: "story about a ghoul and oatmeal". (Now if only I could find some of the other stories that I half remember....)
