Fairy Tale Endings

Liv and I were at the library the other day, and I picked up a bigass anthology of Russian fairy tales that had somehow made its way into the children’s section.

I was delighted in the very first story I read, "The Frog Princess." In the story, the prince has traveled many miles to recover his wife, a frog that his father forced him to marry, but whom he has come to understand is actually a princess. She, magically forgetting him, has become engaged, but she recognizes the prince immediately and they jump on a magic carpet to fly home. But, ahh, her betrothed is cunning, and follows them, coming with ten feet of catching them.

Here is the delightful part. The moment the pursuer is close, “they flew the carpet into Russia, and for some reason he could not enter Russia, so he returned home.”

Three page story. Bridegroom appears in the second to last paragraph. His pursuit of the couple is solved by those magic words “for some reason.” That is just beautiful.

But, that, delightful though it may be, is not what I want to talk about. Far more delightful is this ending, which appears in dozens of tales: “I was there, and I drank mead and beer. It ran through my mustache, but didn’t get in my mouth.”

I’ve been rummaging around the web trying to find out what this means, but the nearest I have found is that it is merely a convention of Russian folklore, much like “they lived happily ever after.”

Brief tangent. A few years back, I read a translated Chinese or Japanese short story about a couple visiting the ruins of a temple, which ended, roughly, with “And that was what happened at the temple that day.” It struck me, but upon reflection seems like an appropriate convention of ending for a piece of Asian literature. Something of the matter-of-fact closure had a cultural resonance (and I can’t possibly tell you why).

So, I’m wondering what it might be that the mead-mustache-mouth convention says about Russian literary culture. What the hell does that phrase mean? Or, as is indicated in one use of it in my anthology, is it merely a flourish? A reminder that what you have just heard is fancy? There seems to be a very Russian taste to it that I can’t articulate.

It has got me thinking about what literary conventions say about a culture. The above-referenced “happily ever after” is an easy one, I think, and maybe only because it is of the culture I live in and sprang from, but also for the bald political implications it carries.

Makes me want to write a fairy tale with this last line:

“And Horatio the Algerian lived happily ever after.”