The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

Studies Books
#1

I’ve just acquired a nice copy of this book, which I’ve previously read maybe 4 times in the past 25 years. I literally weep with intermingled joy and deep sorrow each time I read it - my wife Ronda knows what’s coming when I pick it up. :slight_smile:
It’s not a long story. A grandmother who is dying tries to re-tell the story of Briar Rose (the original name of the Sleeping Beauty tale), to her granddaughter who has heard it many times from her; the grandmother tells it much differently than the tale we all know.
As she’s dying, she whispers ‘I am Briar Rose’ and makes her granddaughter promise to find the castle and the prince. She promises to do that, and starts to go through the rosewood box her grandmother had kept hidden for years.
I won’t give the story away, except for this: the grandmother, as a young girl, was found in a forest, dying, (not sleeping, as in the fairy tale) by a man named Prinz, but the snow falling around them was not the snow of the fairy tale; it was ash from the nearby Chelmno extermination camp in Poland.
Yolen weaves the modern day granddaughter, the fairy tale, and the holocaust together in a way that is sheer genius. True story-telling. And it packs a punch.

edit: I have an incorrect detail up above, but it does not change the story.

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#2

As good as Briar Rose is, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ by Ellen Kushner towers above it. Just re-read it again after a number of years since the last reading.
This is a real ‘fairy-tale’, earthier far than GMac’s tales, and much more evocative and beautiful; in no way though does it reach the mythopoetic power of GMac. They are very different.
Perhaps, because today has been an almost perfect Fall day here in the Rogue Valley - the air is crystal clear, a fresh breeze blowing into the valley from the mountains, the trees in all their glory, bright golds and rusts and yellows and reds, a crisp 60 degrees F - perhaps for that reason, plus the near-poetic imagery and sheer human pathos of Thomas Rhymer, I felt for a couple of hours like I was not even mortal; not more than mortal - just so simply rapt by the telling that mortal cares just fell away - not something that happens to me all that often, and I find it to be very good therapy indeed.
I recommend it for those whose hearts are open to Faerie.

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#3

I’m already there with you brother.

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