Winter’s Tales—Isak Dinesen

"Come gather 'round people..."

AI-generated snowflakes

Often, when one calls a story a winter’s tale, one means that it contains magic, whimsy, or fantasy, and maybe an atmosphere of mystery or enchantment. Some of the stories in Isak Dinesen’s collection, Winter’s Tales, fit that description, such as “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale,” which matter-of-factly introduces a shape-shifter. But I think of these stories more as the kinds of tales people exchange when they cozy up around a fireplace on a cold winter’s night. From the first to the last, I would describe the stories as reassuring or comforting.

Perhaps her audience at the time needed reassurance most of all. Dinesen, author of the highly popular memoir, Out of Africa, published Winter’s Tales in 1942, during the German occupation of Denmark. Although Denmark had declared its neutrality, Germany occupied it, to “protect” it from invasion by France and England. The lenient terms of occupation admittedly left the Danish government mostly in place. Nevertheless, life as a citizen of an occupied country must have left many unsettled by apprehension and foreboding. Eventually, tension and resistance would increase, but at the time Dinesen’s book came out, Germany had not exercised the oppressive force it soon would. With the stories in this volume, Dinesen takes her readers away from the twentieth century and transports them to an earlier time. Her soothing voice and broadly optimistic tales must have assured them that all would be well, this winter, too, shall pass, as had so many others, and we Danes will go on as before.

One story in particular may have offered guidance. In “The Dreaming Boy,” an orphaned boy, upon adoption, re-imagines the circumstances of his life with such conviction that his fantasy replaces reality for the members of his new family. Sometimes, believing the best about one’s life can make it so.

In another story, “The Heroine,” a young theology student, Frederick, tells how he and a group of travelers in 1870 get trapped when a small band of Prussian soldiers takes over the hotel where they have lodged. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which gave rise to the German Empire or the Second Reich, Prussians occupying parts of France would sometimes strand travelers by surprise as happens here. In “The Heroine,” the commander accuses the captured travelers of espionage and plans to execute them all. But one beautiful, elegant, and proud woman, Heloïse, catches the fancy of the commander who offers to let the entire company go free if only Heloïse will show herself to him in the nude. She leaves it up to the others to say whether or not to agree to his terms. They refuse, knowing full well that they have chosen their own deaths. The commander, in anger orders their execution but has a change of heart. He admires their courage so much that he lets them all go free and even has a bouquet of roses sent to Heloïse. Perhaps the story could have ended there, but several years later, Frederick chances to run into Heloïse again, at a club where she performed as a professional stripper. She tells him after the show that posing nude for the Prussian commander would have meant nothing to her. But she didn’t do so at the time because the other travelers would have lived the rest of their lives wracked by guilt believing they had saved their own necks a the cost of Heloise’s degradation.

I can’t help but think that Dinesen thought her audiences needed to believe that noble or romantic displays of courage and dignity could sometimes elicit mercy from soldiers holding their country hostage. In just a few more years, Dinesen herself would take part in the mostly successful plot to smuggle over 7,000 Jews from Denmark to Sweden before the Nazis could round them up.

The stories all have a very strong narrative presence which creates a lack of immediacy or a dreamlike quality. I never felt as though I occupied the same space as the characters, but I did sometimes feel like I sat next to the narrator, as she spun a fireside tale. In some stories, like “The Heroine,” the main character narrates his own story, but even in those first-person stories, the narrator speaks of events from long ago. Dinesen sets most of the stories in the nineteenth century, and some earlier. One need only look at the first line of many of the stories to recognize their once-upon-a-time quality. “Three-quarters of a century ago there lay in Antwerp, near the harbour, a small hotel named the Queen’s Hotel.” (“The Young Man with the Carnation”) Or again, “About eighty years ago a young officer in the guards, the youngest son of an old country family, …” (“The Pearls”). Or again, “In the first half of the last century there lived in Sealand, in Denmark, a family of cottagers and fishermen …” (“The Dreaming Child”).

The first and last tales feature the same person, one Charles Despard (called Charlie, in the last story), and both stories focus on the obligations of writers to their art as well as to their audience. In the initial story, Charles has written a very successful book, but feels like he has nothing left to say. Having arrived at a hotel where he intends to meet his wife, he decides not to go to bed right away and wanders down to the docks where he spends the night sharing stories with some of the sailors. He feels his confidence as a writer restored, but Dinesen doesn’t end the story there. When Charles returns to his hotel room, he realizes he had completely misunderstood his situation—I avoid some spoilers here—and must reinterpret the events of his arrival at the hotel.

In the final story, “A Consolatory Tale,” Charlie listens to someone named Æneas relate a fable about a Persian prince who disguises himself as a beggar and teams up with another beggar who looks just like him. Afterwards, Charlie at first calls Æneas’s story good, but soon corrects himself and says it needs work. These two stories, bookends to the rest of the tales, tell us much about the nature of fiction writing for Dinesen.

I find one persistent feature of these stories worth mentioning: Dinesen doesn’t reveal the nature of the story until almost halfway through. She never announces up front the theme or even the main story-line. She meanders, sometimes quite a bit, before coming to the point. Furthermore, she often continues the story past where one would normally expect it to end, making most of them more complex than a simple winter’s tale. More than one reader has found her oblique approach off-putting, but after the first few times, I just accepted it as Dinesen’s style, and looked forward to seeing where each story would eventually find itself.

Not every one of these winter’s tales has a happy ending, but they all illustrate some romantic ideal: justice, true love, integrity, duty, and so forth. The overarching framework of the entire collection conveys Dinesen’s notion of the writer’s duty to her reading audience. Indeed, Dinesen clearly aims to please. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, written in English, appeared in America before the Danish version appeared in Denmark, and that negatively affected sales in Denmark. After that first mistake, she always made sure the Danish version came out first or at the same time as the English version. So she published Winter’s Tales in Danish and translated it into English herself in the same year. Not every twentieth-century author cared as much about audience reception as Dinesen did.

Next week I’ll write about the 16th century play The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen

Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen

Winter’s Tales, by Isak Dinesen

The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd

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