Since we are all different people, it stands to reason that fairy tales get retold in a dizzying variety of styles. I am now deep in research to write my version of a story called The Blue Light for my massive fairytale undertaking, and I am completely fascinated by how different each version sounds. While retaining the same basic structure, fairy tales are extremely flexible, swapping fairies for ogres and princes for soldiers and poisoned apples for enchanted hazel trees; change the title and poof! They have morphed into new stories entirely. I’ve been reading them steadily for the past year, and I conclude that fairy tales are the soapbubbles of literature.

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Retelling a story, then, becomes easier than you might think; read six versions of Cinderella, and one is left with a sense of license. Why not lose the severed toes, the amateur reteller thinks brightly, but introduce a wicked fairy at the end? Surely if the Grimms used a talking bird and Perrault calls her Cindercrawler, I can change this, this, and this, and retell it my way. The sense of control you can get from this is intoxicating. In fact, if you want to try something fun and liberating, write down your favorite fairy tale, from memory, and then change anything you want. Poof! You have Retold, and added your own little bubble to the collection.

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Anyway, I finally settled on two widely read versions of The Blue Light to use as a basis for my story. One is by Andersen and one is by Grimm. Andersen’s version has giant dogs, while Grimm uses a magic dwarf, but both appear, like genies, when a magic flint is struck. The flint comes into possession of a soldier, who uses it to get rich and kidnap a princess. At the end of both versions, the soldier is tricked by servants of the Princess, arrested, and tossed in jail. At the last minute, his flint arrives, and he escapes.

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Up until now, both stories travel the same track, if you can excuse the dwarf-dog mixup, but the endings are subtly different. Andersen does it like this:

The dogs took the king, and the queen as well. They tossed them high in the air, and let them fall squashed onto the ground. The soldiers were terrified. Everyone cried out, “Soldier, be our king. Make the princess your queen.” So the princess came out of her steel castle and became a queen, which pleased her very much. The wedding feast lasted a whole week, and everyone had a very good time.

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Whereas nobody is left feeling good at the end of the Grimm version:

Then the mannikin fell on them like lightening, darting this way and that, and whoever was touched by his cudgel lay dead on the ground. The king was terrified; he threw himself on the soldier’s mercy, and merely to be allowed to live at all, gave him the kingdom for his own, and the princess to wife.

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And here is my goofy ending:

But the soldier had been long at war, and was weary; so he said, “Blue Light, find me a cottage in a quiet meadow, and let me take the princess there, (for I’ve grown fond of her company) and I shall be satisfied.” And the blue light flickered once, twice, and they were gone from the gallows, just like that. Where they went, no one knows; but there they are, and the blue light was never seen again.

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Ha ha. It’s so girly, I bet the Grimms and old Hans Christian are rolling their eyes at me right now from the afterlife. 

(if you want to read the full, annotated Grimm and Andersen versions, go visit the best fairy-story website in the world, Sur La Lune.)