TRUE! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, and not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded -- with what caution -- with what foresight, with what dissimulation, I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night about midnight I turned the latch of his door and opened it oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern all closed, closed so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly, very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! Would a madman have been so wise as this? And then when my head was well in the room I undid the lantern cautiously -- oh, so cautiously -- cautiously (for the hinges creaked), I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights, every night just at midnight, but I found the eye always closed, and so it was impossible to do the work, for it was not the old man who vexed me but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers, of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was opening the door little by little and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea, and perhaps he heard me, for he moved on the bed suddenly as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back -- but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness (for the shutters were close fastened through fear of robbers), and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily.
I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out, "Who's there?"
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed, listening; just as I have done night after night hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
Presently, I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief -- oh, no! It was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when the entire world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself, "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney, it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or, "It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes he has been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions; but he had found all in vain. ALL IN VAIN, because Death in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel, although he neither saw nor heard, to feel the presence of my head within the room.
When I had waited a long time very patiently without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little -- a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it -- you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily -- until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.
It was open, wide, wide open, and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness -- all a dull blue with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones, but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person, for I had directed the ray as if by instinct precisely upon the damned spot.
And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? Now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder, every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! -- do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me -- the sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once -- once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But for many minutes the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence.
I took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly so cunningly, that no human eye -- not even his -- could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out -- no stain of any kind -- no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that.
When I had made an end of these labours, it was four o'clock -- still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart, -- for what had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.
I smiled, -- for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search -- search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.
The officers were satisfied. My MANNER had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears; but still they sat, and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definitiveness -- until, at length, I found that the noise was NOT within my ears.
No doubt I now grew VERY pale; but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased -- and what could I do? It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND -- MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased. O God! What COULD I do? I foamed -- I raved -- I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! -- No, no? They heard! -- They suspected! -- They KNEW! -- They were making a mockery of my horror! -- This I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! -- And now -- again -- hark! Louder! Louder! Louder! LOUDER! --
"Villains!" I shrieked, "Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- Here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

Many years ago, there was an Emperor, who was so excessively fond of new clothes, that he spent all his money in dress. He did not trouble himself in the least about his soldiers; nor did he care to go either to the theatre or the chase, except for the opportunities then afforded him for displaying his new clothes. He had a different suit for each hour of the day; and as of any other king or emperor, one is accustomed to say, "he is sitting in council," it was always said of him; "The Emperor is sitting in his wardrobe."
Time passed merrily in the large town which was his capital; strangers arrived every day at the court. One day, two rogues, calling themselves weavers, made their appearance. They gave out that they knew how to weave stuffs of the most beautiful colors and elaborate patterns, the clothes manufactured from which should have the wonderful property of remaining invisible to everyone who was unfit for the office he held, or who was extraordinarily simple in character.
"These must, indeed, be splendid clothes!" thought the Emperor. "Had I such a suit, I might at once find out what men in my realms are unfit for their office, and also be able to distinguish the wise from the foolish! This stuff must be woven for me immediately." And he caused large sums of money to be given to both the weavers in order that they might begin their work directly.
So the two pretended weavers set up two looms, and affected to work very busily, though in reality they did nothing at all. They asked for the most delicate silk and the purest gold thread; put both into their own knapsacks; and then continued their pretended work at the empty looms until late at night.
"I should like to know how the weavers are getting on with my cloth," said the Emperor to himself, after some little time had elapsed; he was, however, rather embarrassed, when he remembered that a simpleton, or one unfit for his office, would be unable to see the manufacture. To be sure, he thought he had nothing to risk in his own person; but yet, he would prefer sending somebody else, to bring him intelligence about the weavers, and their work, before he troubled himself in the affair. All the people throughout the city had heard of the wonderful property the cloth was to possess; and all were anxious to learn how wise, or how ignorant, their neighbors might prove to be.
"I will send my faithful old minister to the weavers," said the Emperor at last, after some deliberation, "he will be best able to see how the cloth looks; for he is a man of sense, and no one can be more suitable for his office than be is."
So the faithful old minister went into the hall, where the knaves were working with all their might, at their empty looms. "What can be the meaning of this?" thought the old man, opening his eyes very wide. "I cannot discover the least bit of thread on the looms." However, he did not express his thoughts aloud.
The impostors requested him very courteously to be so good as to come nearer their looms; and then asked him whether the design pleased him, and whether the colors were not very beautiful; at the same time pointing to the empty frames. The poor old minister looked and looked, he could not discover anything on the looms, for a very good reason, viz: there was nothing there. "What!" thought he again. "Is it possible that I am a simpleton? I have never thought so myself; and no one must know it now if I am so. Can it be, that I am unfit for my office? No, that must not be said either. I will never confess that I could not see the stuff."
"Well, Sir Minister!" said one of the knaves, still pretending to work. "You do not say whether the stuff pleases you."
"Oh, it is excellent!" replied the old minister, looking at the loom through his spectacles. "This pattern, and the colors, yes, I will tell the Emperor without delay, how very beautiful I think them."
"We shall be much obliged to you," said the impostors, and then they named the different colors and described the pattern of the pretended stuff. The old minister listened attentively to their words, in order that he might repeat them to the Emperor; and then the knaves asked for more silk and gold, saying that it was necessary to complete what they had begun. However, they put all that was given them into their knapsacks; and continued to work with as much apparent diligence as before at their empty looms.
The Emperor now sent another officer of his court to see how the men were getting on, and to ascertain whether the cloth would soon be ready. It was just the same with this gentleman as with the minister; he surveyed the looms on all sides, but could see nothing at all but the empty frames.
"Does not the stuff appear as beautiful to you, as it did to my lord the minister?" asked the impostors of the Emperor's second ambassador; at the same time making the same gestures as before, and talking of the design and colors which were not there.
"I certainly am not stupid!" thought the messenger. "It must be, that I am not fit for my good, profitable office! That is very odd; however, no one shall know anything about it." And accordingly he praised the stuff he could not see, and declared that he was delighted with both colors and patterns. "Indeed, please your Imperial Majesty," said he to his sovereign when he returned, "the cloth which the weavers are preparing is extraordinarily magnificent."
The whole city was talking of the splendid cloth which the Emperor had ordered to be woven at his own expense.
And now the Emperor himself wished to see the costly manufacture, while it was still in the loom. Accompanied by a select number of officers of the court, among whom were the two honest men who had already admired the cloth, he went to the crafty impostors, who, as soon as they were aware of the Emperor's approach, went on working more diligently than ever; although they still did not pass a single thread through the looms.
"Is not the work absolutely magnificent?" said the two officers of the crown, already mentioned. "If your Majesty will only be pleased to look at it! What a splendid design! What glorious colors!" and at the same time they pointed to the empty frames; for they imagined that everyone else could see this exquisite piece of workmanship.
"How is this?" said the Emperor to himself. "I can see nothing! This is indeed a terrible affair! Am I a simpleton, or am I unfit to be an Emperor? That would be the worst thing that could happen--Oh! the cloth is charming," said he, aloud. "It has my complete approbation." And he smiled most graciously, and looked closely at the empty looms; for on no account would he say that he could not see what two of the officers of his court had praised so much. All his retinue now strained their eyes, hoping to discover something on the looms, but they could see no more than the others; nevertheless, they all exclaimed, "Oh, how beautiful!" and advised his majesty to have some new clothes made from this splendid material, for the approaching procession. "Magnificent! Charming! Excellent!" resounded on all sides; and everyone was uncommonly gay. The Emperor shared in the general satisfaction; and presented the impostors with the riband of an order of knighthood, to be worn in their button-holes, and the title of "Gentlemen Weavers."
The rogues sat up the whole of the night before the day on which the procession was to take place, and had sixteen lights burning, so that everyone might see how anxious they were to finish the Emperor's new suit. They pretended to roll the cloth off the looms; cut the air with their scissors; and sewed with needles without any thread in them. "See!" cried they, at last. "The Emperor's new clothes are ready!"
And now the Emperor, with all the grandees of his court, came to the weavers; and the rogues raised their arms, as if in the act of holding something up, saying, "Here are your Majesty's trousers! Here is the scarf! Here is the mantle! The whole suit is as light as a cobweb; one might fancy one has nothing at all on, when dressed in it; that, however, is the great virtue of this delicate cloth."
"Yes indeed!" said all the courtiers, although not one of them could see anything of this exquisite manufacture.
"If your Imperial Majesty will be graciously pleased to take off your clothes, we will fit on the new suit, in front of the looking glass."
The Emperor was accordingly undressed, and the rogues pretended to array him in his new suit; the Emperor turning round, from side to side, before the looking glass.
"How splendid his Majesty looks in his new clothes, and how well they fit!" everyone cried out. "What a design! What colors! These are indeed royal robes!"
"The canopy which is to be borne over your Majesty, in the procession, is waiting," announced the chief master of the ceremonies.
"I am quite ready," answered the Emperor. "Do my new clothes fit well?" asked he, turning himself round again before the looking glass, in order that he might appear to be examining his handsome suit.
The lords of the bedchamber, who were to carry his Majesty's train felt about on the ground, as if they were lifting up the ends of the mantle; and pretended to be carrying something; for they would by no means betray anything like simplicity, or unfitness for their office.
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

Fairy tales often appear to be one of the ancestor genres to fantasy, and readers, reviewers, and even sometimes critics often draw connections between the two. How much water that argument holds is open to debate; Maria Nikolajeva argues in "Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern" that the commercial fantasy genre is, in most cases, not much like fairy tales at all. Some works, though, show an obvious connection: fairy tales are a perennial source for retellings and adaptations.

Between those intentional fairy tale retellings and the kind of fantasy Nikolajeva discusses, there's a middle ground of texts whose nature is less distinct. Works like Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel simply feel like fairy tales, even when they don't retell a particular story. How justified is that comparison, and what inspires it? The Darkangel evokes more than one genre, including the gothic and (in certain places) science fiction, so what quality are we pointing to when we say it echoes the feel of a fairy tale? Answering that question means first determining what a fairy tale is—a question which has occupied folklorists for centuries. By looking to that body of scholarship, we can begin to tease out how a novel like The Darkangel might relate to this other genre.

One of the most well-known works of folktale (or fairy-tale) scholarship is the Tale-Type Index, assembled by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, and recently updated by Hans-Jörg Uther. The Tale-Type Index groups texts as variant renditions of particular plots. By looking at it, we can see that The Darkangel bears a relationship to a tale-type most commonly known in the West as "Beauty and the Beast," but this comparison only gets us so far; that type is an extremely broad one, known in many diverse forms around the world. The Darkangel is not so closely related to any particular variant that we could call it a retelling. Stith Thompson's Motif Index might be more useful; it's an organized listing of plot elements and objects that commonly appear in folktales. We would certainly recognize details from The Darkangel if we perused it. But since many of the motifs in the index occur throughout fantasy, their presence doesn't move us much closer to understanding why this novel, more than many of its neighbors on the shelves, has a distinctly fairy-tale feel.

Vladamir Propp's book The Morphology of the Folktale shows much more promise. In that influential work, Propp analyzed Russian folktales and boiled their plots down to a series of what he called "functions," which might be story events and/or character roles, such as the donor figure. Propp's breakthrough was to show that, though no folktale has all of the functions, those functions it does have will inevitably occur in a particular order. The story might skip over a broad swath of them, or loop around to repeat a particular series as an episode in the broader tale, but on the whole, the functions form a coherent "grammar" of folktale plot, which is at least partially the means by which we identify the genre as distinct from others.

Analyzing The Darkangel according to Propp's scheme might be productive, but it can be a tedious process. Instead, I would like to point out the shortcoming of such an effort, which is that Propp's analysis is fairly culturally specific. He built his list by analyzing Russian folktales, and for those texts, it works brilliantly. Its effectiveness, however, diminishes the farther one gets from Russia. There are cross-cultural morphologies, but they are of necessity so broad and generic that they don't have much practical use. Propp's work has also been critiqued on gender lines, for a failure to address female heroines (like that of The Darkangel) very effectively.

By contrast, Max Luthi's work The European Folktale: Form and Nature offers an approach that is far less culturally bounded. He bases his analysis on stories from all over Europe, giving us as close to a description of the "Western" tradition as we're likely to get. And Luthi's focus in this case is not the plot or components of a folktale, but rather the style in which those elements are rendered. What happens when we apply his ideas to The Darkangel?
Luthi gives a number of descriptors for the folktale style, including one-dimensionality, depthlessness, abstract style, isolation and universal interconnection, sublimation and all-inclusiveness. We can take these in the order he presents them, and test them one by one against Pierce's writing. The Darkangel is the first novel of a trilogy, but I'll be analyzing it independently. Like many first parts of trilogies, it stands on its own very well, and to analyze all three books would complicate the picture prematurely.

We begin with "one-dimensionality." Luthi indicates two qualities with this term. The first is that, while the wondrous creatures and otherworldly beings of legends exist at home, in familiar locales, their counterparts in folktales exist in distant locations. The hero encounters a talking bear while on his quest, not in his backyard. The second characteristic Luthi classes under "one-dimensionality" is a lack of fear or curiosity when the numinous appears: instead of marveling or cowering, the way a hero in a legend would, the hero of a folktale takes such events in stride. As Luthi points out, "He is even calmed when a wild beast begins to speak, for a wild beast frightens him—it could tear him apart—while he finds nothing uncanny about an animal who speaks" (7). Together, these two qualities mean that a folktale expresses spiritual distance through spatial distance. Instead of being nearby and spiritually strange, otherworldly things are physically distant and spiritually unremarkable.

Aeriel, the main character of The Darkangel, begins the novel in the familiar village where she's lived as a slave for most of her life. Strangeness begins when she and her mistress Eoduin climb the steeps of Terrain, the nearby mountain. It seems to be a journey of at least several hours (though the peculiar cycles of day and night in the novel interfere with that calculation). On the mountainside, they encounter the darkangel (also called an icarus). He's a vampiric man with twelve black wings, who carries Eoduin off to be his bride. Later Aeriel returns to the mountain in hopes of killing him, and is in turn carried off, this time to be the tiring-woman for Eoduin and the darkangel's twelve other brides.

Aeriel therefore goes far away from the village, and in fact never returns to it. From the initial encounter in the mountains, she goes to the darkangel's castle, where she meets gargoyles, the duarough Talb, and the wraiths who are the remnants of the icarus's brides, after he drank their blood and put their souls into the necklace he wears. From the castle, she later journeys to the desert in search of the legendary starhorse, and encounters other strange beings there. This would seem to more or less fit Luthi's criterion of distance.

What about the lack of wonder? Pierce gives at least one explicit denial of that quality, when Aeriel goes to the desert and encounters the Pendarlon, a lyon who, like the starhorse, is the guardian of his land. "Only now did she begin to wonder that she was not dead, that the lyon had rescued her from the vampyre, and that he spoke with a human manner and voice" (147). But Aeriel gets over her supposed wonder immediately after that statement, accepting a talking lyon as a matter of course.

Aeriel does show some emotional reactions to the wonders she encounters, but only occasionally are they based on the strangeness of those wonders. She pities the wraiths, and is repulsed by their mindless, pathetic behavior; the fact that they're dead women is hardly mentioned. The duarough Talb startles her when he seems to come to life from stone, but a page later, he's a trusted friend. Only the darkangel seems to keep a numinous quality for long, and even then, his cold beauty and majestic manner, not his twelve wings and blood-drinking ways, are what entrance and disturb Aeriel.

Moving on, we come next to the quality of "depthlessness." Luthi means a great many things by this term. To begin with, again contrasting with legends, Luthi says that objects in folktales are less often utensils of daily life, and moreover they're "figures without depth, that even have a tendency toward linearity" (11). The most notable objects in The Darkangel are the necklace the icarus wears, with fourteen lead vials hanging from it; a golden spindle he gives to Aeriel, that spins its user's emotions; Aeriel's walking stick she receives from the desert people; the silver hoof of the starhorse, used as a cup; and the edge adamantine, the only blade that can harm the darkangel. The hoof, in its use as a cup, violates the principle of linearity and non-depth, but the shapes of the rest fit fairly well.

Moreover, as Luthi says, "they do not bear the signs of active daily use" (12), and therefore lack depth in time.
He also says that the characters of a folktale lack depth. This is most vivid in the case of injury. Though folktales often feature gruesome mutilations, no one's ever crippled, no one ever bleeds in anything other than a symbolic fashion, and no one ever says "ow." We find in The Darkangel that Aeriel's injured three times: once when she's fleeing to the desert and the icarus bites her, once when a pack of jackal-dogs cut her arm, and at the end, a special case I'll address in a moment. She shows brief pain when her arm is hurt, but the injury's temporary; the lyon's blood heals it not long after. The bite is more serious, and Aeriel spends several months recovering from it among the desert people—but it's hard to shake the suspicion that the time elapses for the purpose of the plot, so that Aeriel can learn important lessons from the desert people and the time when the darkangel will seek his last bride will come closer.
The final injury comes at the end of the novel. Aeriel has collected the materials she needs to kill the icarus, and he's chosen her as his final bride. She poisons him on their wedding night, and he's lying vulnerable at her feet. But when she should kill him, she chooses instead to save him. The darkangel was once mortal, but his heart has been gilded with lead; that must be remedied, for him to survive. Aeriel's solution to this problem is to cut her own heart out and put it in his chest.

Pierce's narrative supplies two faint reasons why we should accept this as possible. One is that Aeriel has just drunk a life-giving draught from the starhorse's hoof (the same draught that poisoned the unnatural icarus); it gives her strength. The other is that the edge adamantine is so sharp that it makes painless cuts which don't bleed at all. Neither one diminishes the fact that Aeriel, like a proper folktale heroine, just inflicted a mortal injury on herself without batting an eyelash. Surgery accomplished, she feels very tired and lies down to die. Talb, baffled at her bizarre solution, melts the lead off the darkangel's heart—which he thought was the obvious answer—and, to save her life, places the heart in Aeriel's chest. The entire scene, like many folktale scenes of dismemberment, makes far more sense in a symbolic light than a practical one.

Aeriel gets to have greater psychological depth than most folktale heroines, though perhaps not the full range of emotional and mental complexity we might expect from a longer novel, or one written for adults. She has a past, though in this novel it's mentioned only briefly. Like many folktale characters, however, she lacks a family, and other ties binding her to the social world of her village; the only real relationship she has there is with her mistress Eoduin, whose capture by the darkangel precipitates the plot. The relationships Aeriel forms with later characters are, as Luthi suggests, expressed through external connections: Talb gives her food, information, and magical gifts, the Pendarlon gives her assistance, the leader of the desert people gives her food and a walking stick that doubles as a weapon.

As for the dimension of time, it too exists in more of a symbolic sense than a practical one. The darkangel goes out every year to find a new bride, and when he has fourteen he'll come into the fullness of his power. The novel covers the span of time between the last two brides, and Aeriel's essentially the only character who changes in that time. And although one can, to some extent, see her changes as a process of maturation, in truth there's minimal difference between Aeriel's behavior at the beginning and at the end. The real changes are in the tools she has at her disposal, and in her appearance, which refines such that the icarus eventually considers her to be a worthy bride.

The third quality Luthi describes is classed as "abstract style," a somewhat generic and unhelpful term. As with depthlessness, Luthi means several things by this. One is that the folktale only mentions what is necessary, when it becomes necessary. For example, each object generally has only one attribute: in The Darkangel we have items such as the golden spindle or the leaden chain. Long descriptions are alien to the folktale, and though Pierce gives us more than a folktale would, her style is still restrained.

The materials of objects, Luthi says, are often metallic or mineral, and especially among metals, "the folktale prefers the precious and rare: gold, silver, copper" (27). This general pattern seems to hold in the novel, with the absence of copper and the addition of lead. Though not precious or rare, it's an exemplar of the other extreme, and a love for extremes is another quality Luthi attributes to folktales. For color, "the folktale prefers clear, ultrapure colors: gold, silver, red, white, black, and sometimes blue as well . . . the only blended color to appear is gray" (28). This is nearly true for the novel. Black, white, and silver are by far the most predominant colors, with grey often expressed by lead instead of iron as Luthi suggests. Blue is the most frequent after those, possibly for reasons of setting: the world of The Darkangel is actually our planet's moon, and the Earth, called Oceanus, appears blue in the sky.

There are two striking differences, however. The first is that red, so common in folktales, is almost completely unknown in the novel, used only for the eyes of the jackal-dogs that attack Aeriel and the Pendarlon in the desert and by implication when blood appears. But blood is in one instance referred to as "rose" (Pierce 193), which leads to the other discrepancy: chromatic colors, in their rare appearances in the story, tend almost universally to be pastels, the blended shades Luthi says do not appear in folktales. Pierce may be using them to suggest the alien qualities of the setting; there are rose-colored lizards (6), and early on, examining the darkangel's black feather, one character says that "Birds are rose, or pale blue, or subtle green . . . There are no black birds" (26).

The majority of the chromatic elements occur away from the darkangel's castle, at the start of the novel or when Aeriel goes to the desert. This suggests that the castle itself is being constructed as a folkloric space, more so than its surrounding world. The other noteworthy point is that Aeriel's coloration changes in the desert: her skin, "a wan rose-tan" (2) at the beginning of the story, is burned pale by the sun (159), and her hair lightens as well. She moves from a chromatic appearance to one more in line with the monochromism of the fairy tale. And her eyes, which the icarus calls "fig-green" (42) when he first meets her, he later calls "emerald" (210). They keep the green color which Luthi says is extremely rare in folktales, but they go from an organic image to a mineral one, from a common substance to a precious one.

Returning to the plot, we find that events in The Darkangel occur with the precision of a folktale. Aeriel encounters all the necessary helpers; they're never omniscient, but they always know or have exactly what she needs, and show up exactly when she needs them. Her magical objects have specific uses, and go away once their use is over. The walking stick serves its purpose when Aeriel knocks a jackal out with it, but then she leaves it behind. The boat Talb made to take her to the desert transforms into a heron and flies away when she gets out, though it'll violate this rule in later books when it returns to her in different forms. As Luthi says, "everything 'clicks'" (31). Aeriel returns to the darkangel's castle with precisely enough time to finish her preparations to kill him; there's no last-instant rushing or twiddling of thumbs.

As Luthi moves through his analysis, he begins to circle back on his own points, approaching them again from different directions. This begins as he discusses "isolation and universal interconnection." The question of extremes, brought up in his discussion of abstract style, returns as a facet of isolation; extreme things are in a sense isolated. Characters are orphans, or youngest children; they're at the royal heights of society or they're utterly common. Aeriel, orphan and slave-girl, matches this description. Luthi's point in highlighting the way in which folktale characters are isolated is then to emphasize how that isolation allows them to immediately and without trouble enter into any relationship which the plot might require. Aeriel's easy friendships along the way might seem to support this.
Isolation does not, however, express itself as strongly in the plot of The Darkangel. Luthi claims that folktale characters fail to learn anything from one another—the third brother is successful at a task because he's the third brother, not because he learned from his siblings' mistakes—or to learn from their own experiences. The episodic structure of many folktales demonstrates this quality, with characters repeating their mistakes or going through a series of identical challenges. It's less true in the novel; Aeriel remembers her past experiences, and details introduced earlier may become relevant later. Pierce also gives us more background and temporal depth than a folktale would. A story Aeriel tells the icarus turns out to be the story of how he, as a little boy, was transformed into a darkangel; Talb has a past that relates to the icarus's. These interrelationships are unlike a folktale.

The issue of motivation also shows a blending of styles. Luthi indicates that folktale heroes are propelled into action not by their own desires—lacking interior depth, they have none—but by external forces and characters. Much of the plot of The Darkangel conforms to this. Events happen because the icarus carries Aeriel off, the wraiths ask her to kill him, the duarough sends her to the desert, the icarus chooses her as a bride. There are two pivotal decisions Aeriel makes for herself, though. She chooses to go for a second time to the steeps of Terrain; nothing forces her, and had she stayed home, the plot wouldn't have happened. Then, when she's defeated the darkangel, she chooses to save his life instead of killing him. Both of these actions are motivated by inner life: a desire to avenge Eoduin, and a love for those aspects of the icarus that are not evil.

As Luthi reaches his final points, about sublimation and all-inclusiveness, he directly addresses the way that "folktale motifs are emptied of their usual substance" (73) or sublimated, calling it both an advantage and a disadvantage. "The folktale loses in concreteness and realism, in nuance and in fullness of content, and in ability to express the deeper dimension of human experience and relationships, but it gains in formal definition and clarity" (73). During the discussion of isolation, Luthi noted that the isolating qualities of the plot are "striking and objectionable" (39) to the modern reader. In these comments, we find the key to understanding the ways in which the novel does and does not map to the qualities of a folktale.
Reading Luthi's book, I found myself feeling at times that he was speaking negatively of folktales. I soon realized that reaction was based in my experience as a fantasy writer: the qualities Luthi attributes to folktales are the sorts of things likely to draw unfavorable responses from members of a critique group. The brief, unsupported statement that Aeriel wondered at a talking lyon is telling, not showing, and her behavior doesn't match its description; furthermore, for a young woman to take such odd things in stride isn't believable.

Modern fantasy partakes more of the characteristics Luthi attributes in passing to legends. Despite its fantastical content, it's realistic in style. Characters marvel at strange things, cry out when they get hurt, and (amnesiac heroes aside) have a past. They learn from their experiences, and the environments they move through are interconnected, with different elements impinging on each other. They suffer difficulties, and magical helpers don't always show up promptly with assistance. When we read stories that fail these standards, we often feel they're poorly written or facile. As a case in point, one review of The Darkangel on the Borders website complains that Aeriel is "flat and uninteresting," "unengaging," "with no backstory and no depth to her"—exactly like a fairy-tale heroine, as the reviewer points out.

Looking at folktales, we find that modern people often don't enjoy reading them. Tales that have gone through literary embellishment may provide the detail that we find interesting, but as a folklorist, I've seen others read transcriptions of oral texts, and they often find them unengaging. Modern fiction trains us to expect certain qualities, as we in turn with our expectations shape the qualities of modern fiction, and the style of today is not a folktale style.

Pierce's novel occupies a middle ground between the folktale style and modern fiction. Her description is simple rather than lush, and the objects in the story are few and iconic. Her characters spend relatively little time on introspection, and at suitably wondrous moments, such as when Aeriel gives the darkangel her heart, they abandon plausible human reactions of pain and fear. But Pierce leavens this with background on the setting and characters and interconnections of those details that help draw the reader in, and she allows her main character a few, pivotal decisions that come from within.

The question, of course, is why the novel's written this way. Clearly, using elements of a fiction style helps Pierce engage her readers, but what does she gain from the folktale style? Scholars have been arguing the purpose of folktales almost as long as they've been arguing the definition of them, with even less agreement, and most of their efforts have focused on the plot rather than the style. Bruno Bettelheim, for example, would tell us that the stories still speak to us today because they resolve the oedipal conflicts of children. Pierce's borrowing, though, focuses on style more than plot. We can only speculate, but I suspect that by echoing the style of folktales, whether deliberately or reflexively, Pierce evokes specific connections for us, drawing on the weight of tradition and the legitimacy we attach to the genre. By giving her work a fairy-tale feel, she attempts to persuade us that The Darkangel is more than just a novel, that it speaks with the modernized voice of the folkloric tradition.

I can remember stories, those things my mother said
She told me fairy tales, before I went to bed
She spoke of happy endings, then tucked me in real tight
She turned my night light on, and kissed my face good night
My mind would fill with visions, of perfect paradise
She told me everything, she said he’d be so nice
He’d ride up on his horse and, take me away one night
I’d be so happy with him, we’d ride clean out of sight
She never said that we would, curse, cry and scream and lie
She never said that maybe, someday he’d say goodbye
The story ends, as stories do
Reality steps into view
No longer living life in paradise - of fairy tales - uh
No, uh - huh - mmm - mmm
She spoke about happy endings, of stories not like this
She said he’d slay all dragons, defeat the evil prince
She said he’d come to save me, swim through the stormy seas
I’d understand the story, it would be good for me
You never came to save me, you let me stand alone
Out in the wilderness, alone in the cold
My story end, as stories do
Reality steps into view
No longer living life in paradise - no fairy tales - yes
I don’t look for pie up in the sky, baby
Need reality, now, said I
Don’t feel the need to be pacified, don’t cha try
Honey, I know you lied
You never came to save me, you let me stand alone
Out in the wilderness, alone in the cold
I found no magic POTION, no horse with wings to fly
I found the poison apple, my destiny to die
No royal kiss could save me, no magic spell to spin
My fantasy is over, my life must now begin
My story end, as stories do
Reality steps into view
No longer living life in paradise - no fairy tales

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, though not necessarily as far as you might think, there was a young maiden.

This young maiden was the envy of all of her fellow maidens that inhabited the small village in the enchanted forest. Her flawless golden, curly, waist-length hair alone was enough to put a little green envy in a female's eyes. Add to that her shapely form, skin of a perfect complection, shining and enrapturing eyes, and lovely singing voice and her fellow maidens started to look like the Hulk every time she passed by.

The fair maiden was seemingly and naively oblivious to her onlookers' dislike and jealousy. She failed to notice every man, young and old alike, stop in their tracks and gape before regaining their composure and sneaking glances at her as they went along their way. No, indeed the maiden went innocently along her way to the secret fairy fountain in the shaded glen towards the north of town to write poetry.

She wrote her poetry, played with the multi-colored fairies, and bathed in the small pond. In fact, the pond had become magical from all of the fairy dust that had fallen into it over the centuries that it had been inhabited by the little critters. Seeing as these fairies were exceptionally beautiful, bathing in the pond daily had the unusual side effect of making one as beautiful as the fairies.

Now, one day, as the maiden was bathing in the fountain, a prince who was hunting in the woods stumbled across the secret glen and saw the beautiful maiden.
"What a beautiful woman!" he exclaimed. "I wish for this woman to be my bride!"

The maiden heard the prince's exclamation and looked up. When she saw that there was a man standing near by and that she was unclothed, she gasped aloud. Grabbing her clothes, she hastily made her way out of the water and ran into the woods. The fairies, who loved the maiden and wished her no embarrassment, distracted the prince and led him astray so that the maiden could escape.

Upon seeing that the maiden was not going to be found, the prince said, "I will go back to the glen tomorrow and hide myself among the trees. Then, when the maiden appears, I will reveal myself and ask her for her hand!"

The prince rode quickly back to his castle, running his plan through his head all the while...