Here, on the platforms of the big stations, they lurk.
They are known as anoraks; after the comfort garment which ceased to be fashionable in the swinging sixties, a coat which combines comfort with privacy.
They wear their battle armour like a cloak of invisibility, for they would rather not be seen at all; they would prefer to disappear into the siren numbers which solicit alluringly from every siding.
The serious trainspotters hold tiny battered notebooks, talismans against a chaotic world.
Unlike the paraphernalia of the chaotic world, you see, every train has a number.
Each carriage has one too; signals, platforms, routes: all create a calming numberscape into which one can disappear, Tron-like, as soon as one dons one’s anorak of destiny.
Glance carelessly at a carriage and wonder, just for a moment, whether the next carriage is numbered consecutively and you, too, could soon be on the road to decoding which depot they come from.
Casual observer, beware.
The world of order is utterly seductive: the works of J.S.Bach, whose works which hail from the first half of the 18th century are such perfect demonstrations of mathematical beauty and logic it fair takes one’s breath away.
He uses mathematical forms like the golden section and the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13 etc) in his organ fugues, and any of his works uses mathematical purity to marry two and more parts.
Oh, to don an anorak and disappear into a world defined by ratio and equation.
Out in the real world, pure infatuation with numbers is anathema. Life is hectic, it is brash, and it is fiercely unpredictable. Pattern can become lost in a blur of haste, sound and fury signifying far too much to be a comfortable port for our numerical anorak-monks.
Yet there are those who venture into the heart of the fray and tease forth order.
Just the other day I was padding through one of my favourite cyber-corridors: a slightly dangerous bastion concerning fairy tales. I happened upon the ancient tale of a serial killer.
It’s a bit chilling: especially if you stumble on it by mistake as you leaf merrily through with your little one, looking for a bedtime story. Make a note: always scan through to the end of a fairy story before embarking on reading it out loud.
For Bluebeard is your classic successful loving husband with crates of cash, the catch of the century, a widower, not prone to stray to the arms of another.
What a catch.
But when he goes off on business the wife is handed the keys to every room but one. And what she finds when she opens the door of that forbidden room has haunted me since I was about eight years old.
Yes: she finds a bevvy of other wives, strung up, gently air drying for posterity; the ultimate in dying love.
A messy tale which does end happily, although not without bloodshed.
And unless you know a lot about fairy tales you will not believe this.
The tale has a number. It is number ATU312: a genuine classified maiden-killer variety fairy tale.
What is more, every other fairy tale from every part of the world has a number too.
As far as I can make out the ATU index is the work of three folklorists: a Finn named Antti Arne who produced a classification index of all fairy tales in 1910; Kentucky man Stith Thompson, who refined it; and Hans-Jörg Uther who reclassified and added to it in 2004 in The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography.
Take a look here: it’s an eye opener.
Just like railway carriages, fairy tales are classified under different types; animal tales, tales of magic, religious tales and so on. There are realistic tales, and jokes and anecdotes to teach a lesson and make one chuckle.
Pick a human condition and it has a quantity, here in the ATU index: there are 24 storylines about old maids, and 49 about tricking clergymen. There are nine stories about heaven, and 16 about hell. Foolish wives, foolish husbands, wily foxes, men who marry princesses: all human yearning and loathing is there.
One section stands head and shoulder above all the others. Because the ogre (or sometimes giant, and even occasionally devil) gets his own section.
There are almost two hundred recorded storylines about ogres. It seems we need the great oafs to battle, in folklore, as we do metaphorically in life.
The rail system is a modern wonder, built and ordered using an intricate numerical system. Bach used numbers to express perfection itself and envelop us in order.
But how much more audacious is a marauding raid on the folklore of centuries: a bid to use numbers to tame tales which were born wild and will remain forever untamed?
Picture source : e mail Ann at anndann@gmail.com or visit her here
Kate Shrewsday 
Morning Kate 🙂 “Battle armour” made me smirk. I’ve always backed away slowly from anyone who mentions a fondness for Ian Allan books on the basis that they might be seriously injurious to my health.
The “here” link doesn’t work for me but I know what you mean about robustly gory fairy stories. Byatt is fascinated by them too and talked about some of them at Cheltenham Lit Fest. I had no idea how some had been ‘Disneyfied’ for modern children. Children adore being terrified in safe circumstances but preferably not to the point of nightmares!
Sorry about that link, Jan! Think I’ve sorted it. I do love those old stories: they lay our demons for us, as the list- of you get the chance to click the link – shows.I ca only assume they were tales not just for little children but for us all on these dark winter nights.
It works! Thanks, Kate 🙂
You’re welcome 🙂
the appeal of finding things categorised is balanced by the fear that only one category is applied to each tale. Fairy tales, folk lore etc often cover a multitude of fields, each deservice a tag.
long live multi-tagging, a human way to put order into the chaos
Excellent point, Sidey: and a lot of work has been done since, by folklorists who have tracked what they call ‘motifs’ across the ATU numbers. An interesting but dry analysis worth a quick skim (and no more!!) is here by academics Sándor Darányi and László Forro…
I love this! It’s a bit like herding cats, but in the process, order is revealed.
Herding cats is a good description, Fiona 😀 and I think it leaves us with the same approximate results: wild stories, their hair on end and eyes staring, corralled into pens they find most inconvenient. It would only take a short while before Schrodinger’s story made an appearance.
It’s not just trains: the Hub is a plane anorak; they have numbers and letters, too. He photographs them, records the reg, follows them online…he’s a geek.
Ah, we’ve talked about this before, haven’t we-and I believe last time we discussed it, I had to admit that on this count I,too, am a geek and follow airplane numbers and destinations to the ends of the earth. Erk.
Using flight tracker? Do you know this site http://www.flightradar24.com/ ?
I’ve not come across this one! I have a nifty app which does roughly this. It means when I see a jet fly over and I’m out in the forest I can find out its destination…oh, dear…
Didn’t some people end up in a foreign prison after plane spotting and being taken for spies? It’s a dangerous business, Tilly, better warn the Hub.
Great post, Kate.
I must look up the news stories, Debbie, I never even thought of that angle! Thanks for coming along to read…
Love the weaving to and fro of the numeracy of trains, planes and fairy tales. I think that the earliest recognition for me of the universe of numbers was the Dewey Decimal System used in libraries. It was so simple and so revealing, even a kid could figure it out and I think that started me on an on again, off again love of numbers.
I have to catch myself in daily life to keep from counting things in passing, maybe a certain number of cars passing through an intersection awaiting a signal change, maybe hazarding a guess as to how many tiles make up a mosaic, etc. I even occasionally count the number of steps to the gym door from the car and don’t even realize it until I’m halfway across the parking lot.
Now, I know this can be considered somewhat indicative of slightly off kilter behavior, but, I prefer to think of it as paying daily homage to numeracy. Besides, one of my favorite Sesame Street characters is “The Count”.
Mine too. You and I must compare notes on Sesame Street: I never grew out of it. The Count is my all-time-top favourite hero. And I have friends who do just the same, so you’re far from alone, Lou! My daughter, in her librarian-post, is discovering a real love for the Dewey Decimal system. Order, order, as they say in The House.
Awesome Maddie!
I’d never heard the term trainspotters . . . Guess what Googling found (among other things) for me? A wondrous place to go back and take a look when I have a bit of time: http://www.trainspotters.co.uk/ ….and I haven’t even gotten to the numbers part! 🙂
Oooh! A salvage heaven for any trainspotter! I’ll see you there, Karen!
Once again I’ve learned something for the first time! I have never heard of the numerical system and classification of tales. I’d never heard of trainspotters until the film Trainspotting released a few years ago, although my husband is “a railroad man” so the order and precision of worldwide transportation systems is readily apparent to me, yet I give it little to no thought. Brilliantly tied to a Bach fugue…I will be more aware of the sounds and patterns and rhythms of the day. How your mind works! Debra
If I could live my life again I’d learn more about the way the world revolves around numbers, Debra. It’s an endlessly fascinating language to explain the globe.
Numerical systems may represent symmetry and perfection but they have not necessarily been tamed. Just look at USA deficits. Runaway numbers.
You’re right, Carl. I know so little about the capacity of numbers to cause chaos. Another whole blog post 🙂
Oh, I am all shivery and breathless with that last line…
That there were trainspotters and Fibonacci and Bach on the way there, well, I have no proper words.
Strange how these lines leap out at us as a conclusion, Cameron, isn’t it? It’s one of the reasons I write these posts. Bubbling in the unconscious are all these thoughts and links we never make explicit: and by laying them out on the table and seeing them side by side the most astounding conclusions explode in fireworks at the end. It’s a seductive journey: and all it takes is following your nose.
Thanks, by the way, for that RT 🙂
Fascinating! I’ve bookmarked the site for a better look-see when I have more time. Thanks.
I haven’t yet found the ATU index linked to its fairy tales, Penny, and I suppose that would be a gargantuan task. For now, we get our titles and follow the leads. I’d love to do a dissertation on the ogre section…
Do not despair. Today is a slower day for me, too.
Reading this finally helped me figure out why I could never learn my chords properly in piano. Numbers and math were involved somehow. I’m off to hunt the Blackbeard tale. 🙂
I was always fabulous at playing the romantics- Liszt, Doppler, and so on – but appalling at Bach. I never had the internal metronome which made me a natural. But when I worked on Bach the effect was extraordinary: similar to meditation, in a way.
Bluebeard: whadda guy. Wiki him for enlightenment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard
I always hated numbers and math and was poor with anything that smacked of them. Yes, they certainly have their place and we’re lucky we have people who know how to use them to advance our knowledge and understanding of the world. But I’m left wondering what sort of individual decides to categorize fairy tales this way. It seems to me more of a peculiar obsession than something really worthwhile.
It is that old argument about whether literature should be analysed and taken apart, whether anything is to be gained by dissecting story, isn’t it, PT? I have never been able to read anything without looking at its component parts: and so to me, ordering the stories has enabled me to see things I never saw about folk tales before. The preponderance, for example, of stories ridiculing clergymen; it says something about the place of men of the cloth in various societies; and this need to have a huge bogeyman in our closets – almost 200 stories about ogres! What is it about us that we need to act and re-enact the overpowering of something overwhelming?
If I had nine lives, I’d probably use one creating a huge ATU site linked to well-told versions of the old tales…
I saw people doing this in Japan all the time. And because I don’t speak Japanese, I couldn’t ask them what they were doing and why. Thank you for your post. Now I know!
I can imagine it would really appeal to the Japanese psyche, Sharon. Numbers are so intricate 🙂 Thanks for that- must google Japanese train spotters!
Really interesting. How weird.
It is, isn’t it! but the closer you look – a bit like train numbers- the more you get drawn in…
Well, well well! All you train spotters out there –
I prefer to look out for Eddie Stobbart lorries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stobart_Group – look for the section on vehicle naming)
and collect all the girls names….
Phil and I used to have Eddie Stobart-Norbert Dentresangle duels on the way up to Southport.
Happy days.
🙂
Numbers are logical, fairy tales are not
Fairy tales fire the imagination, numbers do not.
Is this an attempt to logically explain and organise the imagination? Without imagination we wouldn’t be able to think laterally. Imagine living in a world of numbered boxes…. Which one would you occupy? If they were ordered according to Fibonacci I bet I’d be ‘lumbered’ with the smallest one 😉
You’re right: the moment you put something in a box, you buttonhole it and limit it, Myfanwy. Classify a fairytale and is there a danger you stop its beautiful, fluid evolution?
However I must confess I have a foot in both camps. I was just rambling on to PiedType that I have always loved analysis: there is a kick in it you don’t get from anything else because we may, if we draw the right conclusion, find something deeper about ourselves and our society. The ATU index is a blunt instrument, but looking at the importance our oral storytellers accord to different human dilemmas might indicate what we humans have found absorbing over centuries. I’d venture that just as in our dreams, we fight some of our unconscious battles through our fairy tales: the problem of status, how to have a successful marriage, whether men of the cloth are infallible, and what to do with a seemingly insurmountable obstacles. We order our tales that we might look more clearly in the mirror, maybe?
Planes, Trains, and Fairy Tales . . . starring Steve Martin and John Candy.
Oops . . . that should be Automobiles, not Fairy Tales. I must have catalogued the information incorrectly before filing it away. 😉
The left anal brain is always busy trying to restore order in the right free-thinking brain . . . but assigning numbers to fairy tales seems like a fool-hardy endeavor (except, of course, for obsessive compulsives who are done washing their hands for the day and have NOTHING better to do with their time).
Those who can . . . CREATE.
Those who can’t . . . COLLATE. 😉
Ah, but every day I spend time collating three things in a box marked with an unusual label, Nancy: maybe I am just a collator. To me, analysis is deeply underrated; to analyse, somehow, one must first organise. The fairy tale numberers (if such a term can exist) actually showed me new things by categorising as they did. Collating, problem solving, organising to see patterns in human nature: I wonder if it is its own form of creation.
We might, perhaps, be discussing two different meanings for collate:
1. to compare (as two texts) carefully and critically
2. to assemble in proper order
My point is that assigning a number to a fairy tale in order to “assemble them in proper order” seems rather a waste of time and energy ~ especially since the best fairy tales about turtles or foxes or rabbits aren’t about four legged animals at all.
In contrast, carefully and criticially analyzing, comparing, and contrasting fairy tales (or paintings or musical compositions or “three tings in a box marked with an unusual label”) for interwoven themes might indeed be classified as a creative endeavor . . . with brilliant results (when undertaken by the right person for the task).
If you are “just a collator,” you fall within the careful and critical analysis varietal of the word . . . you are no mere filing clerk! 😀
😀 Thanks, Nancy. I love it when the lawyer in you comes out for a comment *chuckle*
I remember reading that scary wife killing tale – haha – it was in the Clarissa Pinkola Estés ‘Women who run with the wolves’ – a great book for looking at the mutations of fairy tales. I didn’t know about the numerical filing system though (who would have thought). Thanks Kate for another entertaining and educational blog post 🙂
And now you’ve taught me something, Gabrielle. I must get hold of the Estes tale! Thanks!
Hi Kate, thank-you for your post on my site which has brought me to yours, great to read your views on things, a wonderful way with words and a great way of seeing things others don’t but through you have a chance to. Have a great year.
Thank you PerfectPoetry, for coming over to take a look! Congratulations on the last year of blogging!
You would have been a great writer for Cheers. I could see you doing the dialogue for Cliff Clavin: “It is a little known fact that…”
Incidentally, an aunt who was an opera singer told me interesting bits about Bach, I wonder if you’ve come across these bits:
– one piece he wrote as a palindrome. When finished the piece, flip the page upside down and it’s the same piece of music.
– he apparently vented his anger at sponsors by writing profanities within the music in some obscure manner.
– in one piece, the last bit spells B – A – C – then goes crazy for H.
I love Bach’s music, but then I was raised Anglican:
I didn’t know the angry one, Amy! That’s so endearing! I think Bach transcends creed – indeed, he is transcendent. He lifts the mind to somewhere less full of ego, more ordered. If memory serves one study measured children’s activity when Bach was played in the classroom. They calmed and focused much better. Our brain electrical activity, I believe, is said to calm when we hear his stuff. There’s something about his music which is a little like meditation…
Kate: Geek!
Did I mention I love geeks? Hub and the boys are all geeks, so I don’t have much choice. There’s always room for another 🙂
All the best people are geeks, I find 🙂
Wonderful and fascinating – 200 about ogres – who would have imagined 🙂
I know: what are we fighting, down there in our unconscious?
Trainspotters, Bach, Fibonacci numbers, and fairytales (Bluebeard was always one of my favorites)! I am agog, Kate, pulled along in your brilliant wake with my mouth open and my eyes as big as saucers. What a wonderful trip!
Glad you enjoyed the ride, Elizabeth. Loved your Big Bad Wolf and his nemesis…
‘Grimm’ shares the same premise as ‘Once’ – fairy tales are not just fantasies your learn as a child but real stories about a supernatural world blended into our own.