The Fairy Tellers by Nicholas Jubber

Author:Nicholas Jubber [Jubber, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529389258
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

The Rise and Fall of Ivan the Fool

‘Fie, fie, fie! I can smell a Russian soul. What are you up to, girl, doing a deed or fleeing a deed?’

Baba Yaga, ‘The Stepdaughter and the Stepmother’s Daughter’ (Great Russian Fairy Tales, 1860)

The Tale of a Fool and His Horse

Three brothers set out to look for wives, and after a long and fruitless search, they end up in the house of a Baba Yaga, a witch with iron teeth and a single bony leg like a bird’s. Still, her daughters are pretty, so the brothers decide to marry them.

One problem: the witch is planning to chop up the brothers and eat them. Fortunately, the youngest brother, who is known as Ivan the Fool, is warned about this by a magical talking horse (given to him by a supernatural stallion, which he caught in a noose when it was eating his father’s millet). So he advises his brothers to swap places in their beds with their wives. That way, the wives are executed by the Baba Yaga’s walking axe, and the brothers escape with their lives. They take a magic carpet hidden behind a pile of wood chips and ride to freedom, and never give their dead wives another thought.

While his brothers head off in one direction, Ivan goes in another. Arriving in a city to the sound of gunshot, he discovers the tsar has executed a man who volunteered to win him the hand of the beautiful Princess Elena – and failed. So Ivan, being a fool, offers his services.

Discovering the beautiful princess in a faraway kingdom, he attracts her attention by training a cat to dance under her window. The princess is impressed, and when he makes her a beautiful garden full of songbirds, she sits down on a carpet, which happens to be the magic carpet he stole from Baba Yaga’s hut. Off the carpet swoops and flies them to the tsar.

But not so fast . . . If the princess is to marry the tsar, she insists, a few terms will have to be met. So Ivan is dispatched on various errands, advised by his ever-useful talking horse. He hoodwinks Elena’s nurse, luring her with bundles of calico onto a merchant’s ship so he can bring her to court; then braves the stamping hooves of Elena’s fearsome horse, throwing a dozen skins over its back and fastening them with pins. At last, the princess has everything she wants, and the marriage goes ahead, a splendid affair at which Ivan the Fool – youngest son of a millet farmer – sits in honour at the side of the tsar.

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