Rootabaga Stories Review

This week's book is Rootabaga Stories, a collection of American fairy tales by Carl Sandburg.  When I was a kid, we had these on cassette tape, read aloud by (I think?) Carl Sandburg.  He had a distinctive cadence to his voice, which I found myself falling into when I started reading these aloud to my son because my mom sent me a brand new copy of this book for Valentines Day.

It would be hard to give a synopsis of these.  There are several of them, they're very short, and the point of the stories is not what happens but rather the language and the imagery.  So you'll excuse me if I post a longer excerpt than I usually do:

Gimme the Ax lived in a house where everything is the same as it always was.
"The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out," said Gimme the Ax.  "The door knobs open the doors.  The windows are always either open or shut.  We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house.  Everything is the same as it always was."
So he decided to let his children name themselves.
"The first words they speak as soon as they learn to make words shall be their names," he said.  "They shall name themselves."
When the first boy came to the house of Gimme the Ax, he was named Please Gimme.  When the first girl came to the house, she was named Ax Me No Questions.
And both of the children had the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads.
And the hair on top of their heads was a dark wild grass.  And they loved to turn the doorknobs, open the doors, and run out to have the wind comb their hair and touch their eyes and put its six soft fingers on their foreheads.
And then because no more boys came and no more girls came, Gimme the Ax said to himself, "My first boy is my last and my last girl is my first and they picked their names themselves."
Please Gimme grew up and his ears got longer.  Ax Me No Questions grew up and her ears got longer.  And they kept on living in the house where everything is the same as it always was.  They learned to say just as their father said, "The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out, the door knobs open the doors, the windows are always either open or shut, we are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house--everything is the same as it always was."

It's poetry.  That cadence that I remember so well, even though I couldn't have told you what any of the stories were about (except I remember Hatrack the Horse, who wasn't in this collection), just arises naturally from your breathing when you read these stories aloud.

I appreciate how this fits the fairy tale form by use of repetition and flat characters that you can read more into if you want or you can use as an avatar for yourself.  And the repetition also works to make the story lulling, almost hypnotic, which is great for bedtime reading.

I appreciate the odd imagery.  A cliched phrase could get the point across, but these stand out, not because they're inaccurate, but because they're so novel.  The kids in this excerpt have "the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads."  I can perfectly picture children with light on their foreheads, but I have never heard that before, and I never would have come up with that.

I also really like how Midwestern these are.  There's a story about corn fairies who wear overalls, and there's a story about two skyscrapers that fall in love.  But it's more than the content, more than let's tell a fairy tale about a staple of life in Illinois.  There's something in the delivery that not only makes it clearly a fairy tale, but also makes it clearly Midwestern, and I still haven't pin pointed what that is.

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Next week: ???