A Fairy Tale in Russia Miriam R. Kramer Russian folklore comprises dazzling fairy tales that take place in dark forests in the deep winter. Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale and recently published The Girl in the Tower are two lovely novels in a fantasy trilogy about Vasilisa Petrovna, a woman in medieval Russia who straddles a world between myth and conscious reality. As a so-called witch, she is in reality an unconventional Russian soul, claiming her fate in a world that sees women only as mothers and wives. In a lyrical manner, Arden presents Vasilisa Petrovna as a heroine born under unusual circumstances in a beautiful natural world of sky, earth, and forest. The granddaughter of a princess once named a witch, she grows up on her father’s rural farm estate in Lesnaya Zemlya, Land of the Forest. Many miles from Moscow, she matures as an exuberant tomboy, balancing the constraints of female household chores with rambles across her father’s acres of fields and forests. Gifted with second sight, the adventurous Vasya sees domestic spirits that inhabit her house, bathhouse, courtyard, and stables, along with the rusalka, a water nymph who lures mortal men like a siren from the riverbank. Initially alone in seeing these mythical creatures, she pays them tribute and accepts them fully. Wandering into the woods, she encounters two spirits, Morozko, an alternately dangerous and beautiful spirit of frost and death, and his opponent the Bear, a one-eyed creature that feeds on fear and destruction. When a wandering priest, Konstantin Nikonovich, arrives in her village, he deploys his fanatic devotion to stamping out the villagers’ pantheistic beliefs in the spirits of the earth, sky, and forest. By turns fascinated and repulsed by her unconventional beauty and passion, he encourages the villages…
Waiting for The Winds of Winter By Miriam R. Kramer Do we currently need “prequels” and “successor series” to the television juggernaut Game of Thrones? HBO and most viewers would say yes. George R.R. Martin, author of the wildly successful fantasy series of books A Song of Ice and Fire and inspiration for the worldwide hit HBO series Game of Thrones, has announced at least four and possibly five pilot scripts set in the world he has created. While not penning them outright, he plans to collaborate with the writers assigned to each. The last book in his series, A Dance With Dragons, was as absorbing as its predecessors. Published to great fanfare in late 2011, it shot to #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List. In the meantime, the television series, which has released a season every year since it began in 2013, has chronologically passed the books. Both Martin and the showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have carefully stated that parts of the show are now different from those in the books. Fine. Translating books to TV or film can make them separate but equally binge-worthy. All things considered, Weiss and Benioff do an excellent job: they have to adapt the series while dealing with Martin’s time-management issues, so I can’t fault them. The series is a smashing success: the theme music is perfect for the books, the actors are well-cast, the blood and guts satisfy, and many of the computerized visuals, such as the graphic of the Wall, are spectacular. So far the two diverge well. Yet from knowing the books thoroughly and watching the series I’m sure I can accurately guess a number of the developments true for both, in particular one concerning Jon Snow. So the series…