On the inside, it’s a graveyard of bodies who have tried to penetrate it.ĪB: The sleeping girl is exactly that. They are draped in cobwebs and trapped behind a wall of thorns that is literally dead on the inside, with living flowers only growing on the exterior. The sleeping people are stuck in youth, but their lives have no meaning. MS: Gaiman wants us to realize that the best thing we have is what we already have: ourselves. They had to journey to find something else – precious silks – the perfect symbol for fashion, vanity, and something thin, short-lived. It’s a commentary on a youth obsessed culture, where children are idolized because of their surface-beauty, and the wisdom and experience of the elderly is considered second tier when weighed against physical beauty.ĪB: Like the dwarves in the beginning, who thought that the ruby they had dug out of the mountains with their own hands wasn’t worth giving. Even if you could freeze it, you can’t escape it. The entire story speaks to the idealization of youth and the inevitability of time. MS: To fulfill the desire to be young, beautiful, and adored. And it’s the witch who is in the tower, sleeping, by her own design. It’s the prince who grins like a schoolgirl when she kisses him goodbye. It’s the Queen who goes out to save the kingdom with her sword at her side. This retelling is a big reversal of the girl-in-the-tower trope and the sleeping-dead-girl trope. One has to be grounded in reality, in the depths and complexity of life.ĪB: The story itself shows us that even what we think we know can be more complete and nuanced than previously realized. MS: It further drives home the point that you can’t get lost in illusions and the superficial appearances of things. When the ghost of her mother tells her she is “So beautiful…like a crimson rose in the fallen snow,” the image we get is one of blood on innocence. She has done something cruel out of vengeance. MS: We even see a reference to the original Grimm’s story of Snow White, where her evil step-mother is forced to dance to death in iron shoes.ĪB: That makes it clear, in addition to the adventuring and sword wielding, that this ain’t no Disney Snow White. Having set her armor, sword, and adventures aside to fulfill the duties of her title, she feels frozen in her own sense of boring stasis while awaiting her wedding day, when the prince will rise above her to the title of “King.” Unbound Writers Mark Springer and Amanda Baldeneaux discuss what makes this fairy tale re-imagining so unique in a saturated genre. The Queen is not living very happily ever after. They return to the Queen, whom we recognize as a post-poison-apple Snow White, to warn her of the danger. Like the original stories, the characters here are nameless, identified only by their titles of “Queen,” “Dwarf,” “Girl,” and “Old Woman.” When a group of dwarves travel beneath a mountain to a silk market, they learn that a sleeping sickness is slowly creeping across the land, freezing animals and humans in time and place. The Sleeper & the Spindle is a richly illustrated modern fairy tale that blends the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White into an almost unrecognizable retelling. In this retelling, though, the ones misbehaving are the elders. What he hasn’t done before, is concoct a fairy tale retelling that speaks directly to children as much as adults, with veiled Grimm-like warnings about the trouble with misbehaving. Neil Gaiman has tackled the subject of sleeping and dreams before, in his landmark comic series The Sandman.
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