Les Bonnes Fees

When we publish work at Les Bonnes Fees, we always want to know more about it. Fortunately for us, most authors are happy to oblige. Here’s what came about when we asked Merrie Haskell to tell us more about Mother Gothel, grandfathers, and, of course, bells. So, without further ado, here’s Merrie:

Ramps

It started with ramps, or rampion. I don’t remember the why or how of it, though I’m sure it had something to do with Rapunzel (or “The Maiden in the Tower” legend, as folklorists call it)… but one day I was bored and poking around the Oxford English Dictionary–like you do–and I was suddenly staring at the entry for “rampion.” In addition to letting me know that rampion is a salad green, the roots of which taste a bit like filberts, the OED informed me that rampion is a species of bellflower–Campanula Rapunculus. And while reading this, in the distance, the campus belltower struck the hour. And the wheels started to turn: bellflower rhymes with belltower… and a belltower is called a “campanile,” which echoes the genus Campanula…

And there it was in my brain, the title complete: “Rampion in the Belltower.” I had the title ages before I had the story; all I knew then was that there were bells, and I knew that my Rapunzel was going to be named Rampion, and that was about it.

Grandfather Magic

My grandfather was a great storyteller. His epic was the story of a turtle who did such clever things as got his tail cut off in a lawnmower, and put ice cream from the Sunday school picnic in his pocket to take home for later. I have many great memories of my gramps, and I’d been long wanting to write something that commented on the magic that grandfathers seem to possess. So, when I decided that the belltower story was about a granddaughter, I knew that Rampion was not a prisoner in the tower–at least, not a prisoner of a family member.

Once I was thinking about the story and thinking about my grandfather at the same time, I remembered the Mackinac Island legend of the Devil’s Kitchen, about cannibal spirits that trap a young woman and her grandfather high in a cave without food or water for many days. This seemed to fit together very well with my vision of a belltower, and it suddenly seemed clear that instead of an evil witch holding Rampion prisoner, a medieval zombie attack would imprison her even better.

Mother Gothel

I knew that if I ever wrote a Rapunzel story–which “Rampion in the Belltower” obviously was–it probably wouldn’t be about the sexual politics of cloistering one’s daughter. That’s interesting stuff, but I didn’t think I had anything new to say about it. And I didn’t want to play with the mother-captor bit at all. Once I’d stumbled upon my medieval zombies via the Mackinac Island wendigos, it was simple to exonerate Mother Gothel in that regard, and turn her into a stork/protective spirit.

Mother Gothel, says Maria Tatar in The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, was a generic term in Germany, “designating a woman who serves as godmother” (p. 112). Mother Gothel is the usual name for the kidnaping witch/fairy/enchantress in Rapunzel, and while the name is clearly loaded, there seemed no better or more appropriate name for Rampion’s mother in the story–even though in my version, Gothel is Ramp’s birth mother, and it was Gothel who craved ramps during the pregnancy, just as Rapunzel’s birth mother does in the traditional versions.

Bells

While writing this story, I would stand outside (and sometimes inside) one of the two campaniles at the university where I work during the noon bell concert. I don’t specify the size of Rampion’s carillon, but it’s more than 23 bells, which is the minimum for a proper carillon (anything less is a chime).

While researching for the story, I discovered that bells were often named for saints or religious events. (Sometimes they were also inscribed with the function of the bell, such as “I mourn for death.” I just now discovered an inscription “I break the lightning”–which I wish I’d come across before writing this story! How poetic.) Rampion’s campanile houses a Saint Sebastian and a Saint Barbara, an Assumption and a Crucifixion. Saint Barbara, incidentally, was shut up in a tower for refusing to marry on her father’s orders.

And I named two of Rampion’s bells in relation to storks: the Kind Mother refers to the stories of the devoted parenting of storks; so the Little Stork is, in a sense, the Kind Mother’s offspring. It is not coincidental–in terms of my story, anyway–that storks and belltowers are both terribly common in the low countries. (I imagine “Rampion in the Belltower” taking place in an unremembered principality between the Netherlands and Germany, where a zombie plague appeared a few hundred years after the first waves of the Black Death.)

Further Reading

I didn’t know that much about belltowers before writing this story. Sure, I could see Duke University’s belltower from my mother’s bedroom window while I was growing up (a tiny Gothic spire in the distance, poking up over the sea of loblolly pines between our house and the chapel)–and sure, one of my college roommates played the University of Michigan carillon and always enthusiastically demonstrated the way she would smack the batons when asked–but I learned a lot through research.

There’s interesting stuff about bell naming and inscriptions at lovetoknow’s Classic Encyclopedia entry on “Bell”.

The Guild of Carilloneurs in North America certainly know what they’re talking about, and had lots of great info.

Everything you ever wanted to know about rampion (circa 1900) is available at A Modern Herbal. Or you could make Ramp butter, but good luck finding any ramps.

And I never rewrite any fairy tale without visiting the annotated stories at Sur La Lune Fairy Tales.