'Frozen'

Two little girl princesses in some distant northern land. The younger (Anna) badgers the elder (Elsa) to get up and play with her. Elsa, though reluctant, is finally persuaded. She can make snow and ice appear with a wave of her hand, and they play snow games in the hall of the palace till Anna is injured. After this, Elsa is sequestered in her apartments for fear her gift will cause harm, though Anna continues to knock on her door and beg her to play.

In due course the king and queen are drowned; Elsa, now grown up, is to become queen. Foreign dignitaries arrive for the coronation. Anna makes the acquaintance of Prince Someone-or-other, they share some flirtatious high-jinks, and she believes she is in love.

In the coronation ceremony, Elsa is asked to remove her glove, thus unveiling her frost-dealing hand. When Anna comes to ask for permission to marry the Prince, Elsa rebuffs her and lets loose a storm of winter on the country. The people mutter, Elsa flees to the mountains and conjures up an ice palace for herself.

Anna borrows the Prince’s horse and sets out to find her sister and get her to lift the spell of winter. When the horse can go no further, she falls in, at a general store in the wilderness, with Kristoff, a mountain man with a sledge drawn by a reindeer; she enlists him to take her to Elsa’s retreat. After many adventures they get there, picking up Olaf, a talking snowman, on the way. Anna petitions Elsa, who evicts them with the help of an ice monster.

Anna & co, pursued by the ice monster, are forced to retreat down perilous cliffs, etc. In the course of this Kristoff notices that Anna has incurred a deadly and progressive injury – a splinter of ice has pierced her heart. It seems this can only be cured by true love, which is defined as putting someone else’s need before your own.

Meanwhile, the Prince’s horse has returned riderless to the palace, whereupon the Prince sets out to search for Anna, accompanied by an armed force some of whom have orders to kill Elsa if they find her. They have a much easier job of reaching the ice palace than Anna and Kristoff did, and capture Elsa even while the attempts on her life are frustrated by her own efforts and those of the Prince.

The Prince now announces that his intention all the time has been to secure possession of the kingdom. Elsa is confined to the palace, her potent hands locked into sleeves. Here, while Anna and Olaf search for Elsa, Anna is overcome with outer and inner frost and left for dead; Olaf revives her by lighting a fire to his own danger.

Elsa summons an explosion of cold; her prison is blasted open and she escapes; Anna, tracking her through the snow, reaches her sister just as she herself is transformed to solid ice. This breaks the spell; summer is restored, the kingdom put to rights – and Olaf is granted a little peripatetic snow-cloud to save him from melting.

What are we to make of all this?

There are, of course, familiar elements. The paired journeys – difficult and easy. If the storekeeper who introduces Kristoff looks like a Donor out of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Kristoff and his reindeer are surely Helpers from the same schema, and Olaf can fill the role of the Hero’s wisecracking sidekick (the girl Luned in The Lady of the Fountain, the cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service). The Prince’s volte face was a surprise, but I could wear it as ‘False Hero is unmasked’. But who is the Hero, and what sort of a narrative is it? For without knowing that, what satisfaction can we take from its conclusion?

I am, of course, assuming a narrative of four stages – the garden (a), the wilderness ($), the city (S₁) and the new place (S₂) – occurring always in that order, but subject to cyclic shifting so that any of the four elements may be initial. Propp’s folktale, for example, begins with $ and ends with a.

Each of these stages has its governing character –the Donor, the Villain, the King and the Princess respectively – with whom the Hero interacts, and the transitions between stages are marked by the requirement to perform tasks ($ to S₁, S₂ to a) or undertake journeys (a to $, S₁ to S₂). Given this framework, it should be possible to identify who is performing the various roles.

Anna is the focal character, and as such entitled to the first audition for the role of Hero. If we can leave aside for a moment the complicated initial relation between the two sisters, the release of Elsa’s destructive powers (violation of a prohibition) ushers in the wilderness phase, Anna’s meeting with the Donor, her acquisition of Helpers, their difficult journey. Like the Green Knight’s castle in its frozen wilderness, the ice palace stands for the city – the site where the Hero must encounter the Villain. Who then has to be Elsa.

This is where identifying Anna as Hero begins to lose credibility. The difficult journey should properly have preceded the meeting with the Donor, we might have expected a task or tasks prior to entry into the city – but allowing for some telescoping of these elements, what do we make of Elsa as Villain, and what is new about the place in which Anna finds herself after their encounter? The new place is connected with denouement, explanation, unravelling, ultimately with death: Anna has been struck by a terminal affliction, certainly, but no overarching explanation is offered for the course the story has taken so far.

We could conclude that the scriptwriters were just using an incoherent grab-bag of familiar elements – Olaf the snowman thrown in to appease the toddlers, for example, as Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review suggests – but is that even possible, given the unconscious pressures writers and readers alike are subjected to by the act of story-telling? The way Anna’s hair is lifted by the wind may be delightful for the beauty and sheer virtuosity of the effect, but a thousand such effects – and there must be a thousand – are not enough to compensate for a worrying unease: not only do we have no resolution, but it is not even clear what it is that needs to be resolved.

The only other character prominent enough for the role of Hero in the story is Elsa – but what then to make of the three injuries/rebuffs she gives Anna? The threeness is suggestive – it’s often associated with the tasks the Hero must fulfil to make the transition from wilderness to city or, as with Gluck in The King of the Golden River, from new place to garden. Yet Anna’s actions don’t easily square with the kinds of task the Hero is typically asked to fulfil, whether it be sharing a meagre morsel with a beggar, or turning aside from a quest to help an old woman. The best fit for the interaction of Elsa with Anna is Propp’s D⁹ : ‘Combat with a hostile Donor’.

This, finally, is the key to unlocking the significance of the tale and to explaining what makes it superficially so impenetrable. The problem is ideological: once one realizes that ‘Frozen’ is a Satanist fairytale, everything falls into place. The supreme good in this story world is not the welfare of others, but self-fulfilment. What Elsa is trying to win from Anna, and what Anna is so reluctant to give, is autonomy.

A common feature of the wilderness phase is the revalorization of the Hero by association with some precious or beautiful thing: Cinderella and the glass slipper, Owein and the magic ointment. For Elsa, it is her own creation – the ice palace – not something bestowed by a kindly stranger. The city is her confrontation with the Prince (the Villain), whose villainy is now completely explicable: he doesn’t want to marry Elsa because he is a villain, but he is a villain because he wants Elsa – his earlier flirtation with Anna is seen to have been a sighting shot.

From here it’s an easy journey for Elsa to the living death of confinement (?marriage) within what is now the Prince’s palace, all her powers held in check. A supreme effort – difficult task – blasts her out of this new place and makes possible the garden finale: Elsa reconciled with Anna, who has at last learnt to love Elsa for what she is rather than seek what Elsa can do for her. Unlike the conventional Hero, Elsa doesn’t win the Princess – she is the Princess in her own fairytale. In a significant coda, Olaf too is freed to do his own thing – to remain a snowman whatever the weather.

Anna’s story, though foregrounded, is a subplot, and a subplot of the Bildungsroman variety, which begins with S₂ and moves through a and $ to S₁. This kind of story often begins with a separation from parents – here Anna’s separation from Elsa is the event that initiates her entry to the new place. Her flirtation with the Prince (who here plays the role of Princess) is the garden, she journeys to find rejection from Elsa in the wilderness (Kristoff playing the role of Donor by telling her what true love is), and through the difficult task of overcoming her own resentment she arrives at last in the city, a new social synthesis where her broken relationship with Elsa is re-formed.

Though the story shares with Andersen’s Snow Queen the motif of the debilitating shard of ice in the heart, it is hard to imagine anything quite so different as ‘Frozen’ from Andersen’s erotic allegory. But a Satanist fairytale is something, I suppose – Aleister Crowley would have liked it, and the fantasy of becoming an autonomous being appeals to the adolescent in all of us.

That Beowulf was written by an Irishman called Kevin? Unthinkable? How about an acrostic of cwealmcuman (792), ænig (802), burston (818), Geatmecga (829), inwidsorge (831) & niða (845) - it would have to be Middle Irish or the b would be an m, as I understand it.

It all seems a bit random, perhaps - but: in one way of setting out the poem, the rune eþel is separated, on the 3 occasions it occurs, from the word gist by 528, 528 and 527 lines respectively.

Ethelgist could be a name and so a signature, but I don't entirely believe in it. What if the phrase or compound were a translation of patriae alienus, I ask myself, and find that phrase is used by Gregory in reference to Cain.

So separate 'Cain' - CA+527+IN, and substitute letters of the alphabet for these numbers: CAEBGIN.

Which crosses cæbgin in a nice symmetrical way: the mean of the first eþel-gist pair is 829.

A little trial balloon:

Listen! The Spear-Danes in olden times:
we've heard about the glories of those kings,
princes that did deeds of valour then.
Scyld of the Sheaf line – often from enemy warbands,
many nations of them, he tore away their mead benches,
terrorized their fighters, from the time he was first found,
a helpless child. Fortune made it up to him,
he grew up beneath the skies, earned honours,
to the point that every one of the peoples settled round about,
across the whales' roads, was obliged to obey him,
yield tribute – that was a good king for you!

Horace, Odes 1, 22

A man who's pure in thought and deed
Of dangers, Fuscus, takes no heed,
No poisoned arrows will he need,
No bow or quiver.

Whether by Syrtis' surging shore
His way should take him, or the roar
Of torrents that from Caucasus pour:
Hydaspes' river.

In Sabine woods I wandered free
And warbled about Lalage:
A grey wolf took one glance at me
And ducked for cover.

As fierce as any lion you'd meet
That sucked on Libya's barren teat,
It cowered in abashed retreat
Before a lover.

Stuck on some treeless northern plain
If Fate should tell me to remain
While sad-sack Jove pours down the rain
Forever after,

Or in the land where Phoebus' car
Swoops down too low, and houses char,
I'll love her still, however far -
Her voice and laughter.

A couple of years ago, after a service in the University Church in Oxford, I wrote:
'Reflected on forms of prayer – whether reiteration of formulas helps straighten the mind and iron out kinks. Must read what Johnson says on subject. Good literature does the same thing, I think, but more slowly and you have to be exposed to it. Perhaps long exposure of English to Prayer Book liturgy has done something for them, because I think that as people go they are a fairly sane lot.'
Now I read this in New Scientist (May 11, 2013):

‘Feeling run-down? Try a little chanting or meditation – yes, really. Such relaxation techniques can boost the activity of genes that promote good health, and a few minutes each day is enough to show results.’

Yet the benefits, though apparently real, seem to flow only to the practitioner: adherents of religions emphasizing the repetition of rituals or meditation are as prone as anyone to violence against their fellow-person.

Emphasis on the content, rather than the form, of religious observance, while it might do less for you, might do more for others.

Some thoughts about the narrative structure of My Neighbour Totoro (Studio Ghibli 1988):

We open on S2, the new place. It often entails separation from parents, and here, of course, it is separation from the mother that is at issue. It’s a place where everything awaits discovery, but there are images of death as well – the bottle in the limpid stream, the decayed woodwork, the rubbish under the house. The girls’ father, I think, plays the role of King, while the old grandmother is a mentor. There should be an easy task to make the transition to the next phase – perhaps the father’s instruction to the girls in the bath to laugh off the frightening aspect of natural phenomena is it. This phase concludes with their visit to the hospital on the bicycle and the news that their mother will be better soon. The role of Hero is distributed between the two girls here, though Mei is the primary focus.
The garden, a, begins the next day, which opens with the image of the camphor tree. Mei gathers flowers after Satsuki has gone to school, and is led in due course into Totoro’s sanctuary in the heart of the tree. The flowers, ferns and butterflies emphasize the idyllic setting, echoed in the outer world by the landscape through which Satsuki is seen returning from school. Later the father explains the tutelary role of the tree, and the day, and phase, close with Totoro sitting atop the tree in the moonlight. Totoro is clearly Princess here, while Mei is Hero.
The next phase is transitional. We would expect a difficult journey, and what we get is a troubled journey both for the girls – Mei runs away to the school, the two sisters make their way home in the rain, and for their father, who misses the train and isn’t on the expected bus. Totoro makes an early appearance as Donor, giving the girls the bundle of acorns which lead to the dream-sequence promise of protection, ending with Totoro and the girls perched on the camphor tree. In the morning, an image of birth, the acorns have sprouted.
The wilderness, $, begins with the arrival of the telegram. The children are gathering vegetables with the old woman, who as Donor gives Mei the valuable token of the cob of corn which is an assurance of health for her mother. But when Mei, desperate to find her mother, becomes lost, not once but twice, Satsuki takes over the role of Hero and her search for Mei is the difficult task. She invokes the aid of Totoro (Donor), and with the cat bus (Helper) finds Mei and is reassured that their mother will be well. The final sequences reassure us that we have arrived at the city (S1). This often involves a reunion, or the forging of a new relationship, with parents – we have the girls’ mother arriving at their new house in a taxi, and the three of them in the bath together, but also images of the girls playing with the neighbourhood children. They are part of a new society now.

improvised during a waking moment at some early hour:

My love is like a candle
That someone set alight.

My love is like a boxing glove
That's useful in a fight.

My love is like a towel
That's neither wet nor dry.

My love is like an extra lens
Implanted in the eye.

Any reference to a living person? Who knows?