The Fairy Tellers by Nicholas Jubber

Review by Eleanor Updegraff

We all grow up with fairy tales. Whether or not they play as formative a role as they clearly did for Nicholas Jubber, it is a fair bet to say one or two will have appeared in every childhood, across all languages and cultures. In fact, as Jubber’s eclectic, continent-hopping exploration shows, few things are more universal or timeless than the fairy tale — and yet those to which we commonly have access are merely the tip of a much larger literary iceberg.

Hans Christian Andersen is, as Jubber puts it, ‘the most celebrated fairy-teller who’s ever drawn breath’, responsible for such classics as ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘The Snow Queen’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’. Yet Denmark’s most famous son appears only towards the end of The Fairy Tellers, which before then spends a good two hundred pages romping playfully through several centuries of storytelling, from Kashmir in the eleventh century to Russia in the late 1800s. Along the way, we encounter a handful of familiar names – the Brothers Grimm, perhaps Giambattista Basile – but also, as Jubber has intended, a whole host of literary figures that are likely to be new.

Take Dortchen Wild, one of many imaginative teenagers who gave to the Grimm brothers the stories that would later make them famous (‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’), or Hanna Dyab, the hapless Syrian adventurer who was the original creator of Aladdin. Then there is Somadeva, an intriguing figure whose vast but chronically overlooked Ocean of the Streams of Story has ‘a strangely modern feeling . . . In its interconnecting, narrative promiscuity, its relentless polyphony, it feels like surfing the Web.’ The majority of these storytellers, whose genius Jubber never doubts, have been dropped from the mainstream, whether deliberately or accidentally, sinking beneath the weight of the few names that remain in our heavily Western-leaning fairy-tale culture.

Though by no means exhaustive — a feat that would surely be impossible — The Fairy Tellers dives deep into the lives of these select forgotten storytellers, proving itself to be a treasure trove of fascinating information. Jubber himself is a consummate tale-spinner, bringing to life the grand rooms of Versailles and the lush valleys of northern India, relishing in particular the colourful cast of characters with whom he has to work: ‘a countess accused of lesbianism, a lady-in-waiting who disguised herself as a bear, the pipe-smoking princess to whom they dedicated their works, and the court secretary who outsold them all’ is how he introduces us to Parisian high society of the late seventeenth century.

Not content with providing a straightforward collective biography, Jubber also visits the modern-day versions of many of his book’s settings, enabling him to add a small dose of travel writing that is always atmospheric, though occasionally a diversion too far. In a book that seeks to cover this much ground, less can often be more, but, perhaps influenced by his subjects, Jubber seems not to be a fan of the concise sentence. A raft of footnotes does come to his aid here, allowing subtle interruptions to the main narrative and lending a scholarly touch to what is otherwise lively, avuncular prose — dry and dusty scholarship, The Fairy Tellers most certainly isn’t.

Interposed between chapters — each part of the book, which looks at a different ‘fairy-teller’, is helpfully broken down into bite-sized sections — we encounter Jubber’s own reworking of the often classic fairy tales to which he refers. As page count presumably wouldn’t permit any stories to be told in full, he has gone for a synopsis model, whipping through tales with the same high-spirited, at times irreverent tone that characterises the entire book. Though at first this may take some getting used to, it ultimately proves an effective way of binding The Fairy Tellers closer to its source material and — in this case, at least — inspiring the reader to seek out the originals.

Re-telling several of his subjects’ stories also allows Jubber to illustrate one of the wider points of The Fairy Tellers, namely that many of our most beloved fairy tales appear in various languages and cultures: often linked, sometimes copied, even as almost identical stories that arose independently. They can also be summarised here in their true form, without any judicious editing to make them palatable for younger audiences – these are fairy tales as they were originally intended, by and for adults. In examining them from an uncommon angle, Jubber breaks apart the stories now so closely associated with childhood to show us how, even centuries after their first telling, they still reflect the world, in all its darkness and wonder.

The Fairy Tellers is published by John Murray Press, 20th January 2022