Allerleirauh

SurLaLunaFairyTales.com

Allerleirauh is German for All-Fur, or All-Kinds-Of-Fur, and is the name for a Grimm's fairy tale. There are many variations of the tale (The She-Bear, Bearskin, Catskin, Donkeyskin, etc.) and all of them involve a girl wearing some sort of fur disguise or coat, and passing herself off as a wild animal. A prince/king/lord captures her and she works in his palace until at some point he discovers her secret and marries her.

In the version recorded by The Brothers Grimm, It starts with the girls father being a king who is trying to marry her because she is as beautiful as her mother. In an attempt to waylay him, she asks for three impossible gowns and a cloak made from skin of every animal in the kingdom. Unfortunately he manages to complete each task and announces their marriage. That night she packs her three gowns in a nutshell, grabs three small gold objects and runs away wearing her all-fur cloak, with her face and hands blackened with soot.

Comic adaption by Gina Biggs and Elle Skinner

This is one of those rare tales that seems to have been made MORE gruesome by modern retellings. This is as opposed to Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and many others which have been thoroughly subdued over the years to be more "child friendly."


I was recently going through my book shelves and stumbled across a variation of the Allerleirauh story, Deerskin, by Robin McKinley. This is a book that I have been at war with since high school, but just haven't been able to shake. I read it some time during sophomore year and did not like it. It bothered me and itched under my skin.


Four years later, I was reading another book by McKinley, The Hero And The Crown, which is part of a two book set that I have enjoyed enough to read multiple times. Stupidly, I got to thinking, about Deerskin again. Had I judged it too harshly the first time? Yes the subject was rough, but she's a good writer so it couldn't have been so terrible. So off I toddled to Half-Price Books and managed to find a very cheap copy in their online store. It arrived. I read it. It sucked.
And now again, another year has passed, and I find myself face to face with this gruesome tale.

So now I suppose I should explain why I dislike it so much (WARNING: SPOILERS, seriously). Firstly, the writing bothers me. I don't even know half of why, but even if I start reading much later in the book and skip the nasty part, I still feel like I'm chewing a handfull of cherry pips. Also, the choices made with the story make me twitch. This is the meat and bones of my face off with this book. In McKinley's version of the tale, the princess does not get away from her father unscathed. Before their wedding, the King breaks into his daughter's room and rapes her, causing her to flee, with her dog. She runs into the woods where she pretty much loses it, and prematurely gives birth to a still born child. To save her from herself, the goddess of the moon comes to her and blesses her with memory loss, a silver dye job, and a deerskin dress that never wears or dirties. So yeah, she goes off and finds her prince, going under the name Deerskin, eventually regains her memory, and saves the prince's sister from marrying he father (Deerskin's father, not the prince's). In the end the prince proposes, but Deerskin is skittish and feels unclean, so he promises to wait as long as it takes.


It's a very disturbing and brutal story. I also feels that it kinda kills one of my favorite things about the original story, which is the independently strong and clever female protagonist. Deerskin's reaction to her trauma is very realistic, but in real life, we don't have a goddess to mold us in her image and erases our memories until we're ready to deal with them. Not only that, but why Deerskin? Why not all the other abused girls in the country? Why does this princess get special treatment? And why of all things, does her "time of the month" only last a single day each month? I know this is a fantastical land, and that means that we're supposed to let it stretch our imagination, but no female reader's imagination is going to stretch that much.


So here I am, looking at this book and trying to figure out weather I should keep it, as a sign of respect for the author, or just give it away and let it gnaw on somebody else's bones for a while.