Call Me a Dreamer

During this holiday season, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen"* has been a common topic on a number of fairytale-related sites, perhaps because Disney is rumored to be planning its release as a full-length animated feature.

Since "The Snow Queen" is one of my favorite literary fairy tales, as well as my favorite of Andersen's work, I thought I'd share a few links.

SurLaLune held a Snow Queen Week for the Winter Solstice, starting on December 20, 2009. There are a couple of earlier posts about "The Snow Queen," available through that link, too.

Once Upon a Blog offered The Snow Queen as part of its Stories for the Season series. (In this series, not Snow Queen related, but very beautiful, is the Torvill and Dean ice-ballet special, Fire and Ice, which I loved.)

The Fairy Tale Cupboard has a lovely article, Queens of snow and ice, on the women of winter found in many stories, both traditional and literary.**

Wendy Donawa, Ph.D., an instructor at The University of Lethbridge, Alberta, and The University of Victoria, British Columbia, uses "The Snow Queen" to provide insight into the educational process at Phanopoeia: In the Shadow of the Snow Queen.**

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Also, on a completely unrelated note, pjthompson has an awesome collection of links. I highly recommend that you check out her post, Weekly weird roundup. I especially enjoyed What were They Thinking?.

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* You can read the full text of "The Snow Queen" on The Literature Network. Btw, my husband and I both grew up with the beautifully illustrated version in Adrienne Ségur's fairy tale collection of the same name. You can see more of Adrienne Ségur's work in Terry Windling's (t_windling) article in The Journal of Mythic Arts, A Tribute to Adrienne Ségur.

** This link via Once Upon a Blog.

Via storybookland, pallid_regina is a graduate student doing her thesis "on the persistence of the fairy tale princess as a cultural icon and how new media is changing her," and would like as many people as possible to respond to her questionnaire, which is posted in its own community, princess_thesis.

The questionnaire is quite lengthy and she needs the answers by January 19th. Even if you don't feel up to completing the questionnaire, perhaps you wouldn't mind spreading the word.

I came across this lovely, evocative photograph when I chanced upon faeriemaiden's LJ Community banui_graphics and followed a link to her photographs on deviantART:



The Pool of Sight by ~ senza-fiato on deviantART

I half expect a frog with a ball in its mouth to appear in a moment, although the caption/title is more suggestive of a seer. Either way, it's a beautiful photo.

While looking for fairy lore about handkerchiefs in response to this post by asakiyume, I came across the following story on the SurLaLune Fairy Tales website: The Three Daughters of King O'Hara. This story is from the book Myths and Folklore of Ireland by Jeremiah Curtin. I'd never come across this story before and was really delighted with it as it combines elements of a number of different fairytale motifs.