The Fiddler of the Northern Lights

(From: Amazon.com)

What makes the northern lights transform shapes and move so beautifully across the night sky? You're probably thinking it has something to do with energy in the atmosphere. Actually, it's due to the expertly played music of a North Woods fiddler. Just ask Grandpa Pepin and his grandson Henry from forests of Quebec. In The Fiddler of the Northern Lights (illustrated in watercolor by Leslie W. Bowman), Vermont author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock tells the story of how the Pepin family and their neighbors overcame their skepticism and came to believe in this mythical musician.

Grandpa Pepin tells eight year-old Henry many French-Canadian legends, about the "great white owl--l'hibou blanc--or the terrible loup-garou, who was part man and part wolf," and about rabbits who dance on moonlit nights. Henry's brother and mother both insist that his Grandpa is just telling stories again. One moonlit winter night, Henry and his grandfather, hoping to find the legendary fiddler, go ice skating down the St. Maurice River. They return home to the rebukes of Henry's mother for being gone so long. But then they all hear a knock on the door--quite an unusual event for a winter night at a backwoods cabin. The fiddler of the northern lights is on the doorstep looking for a fire to warm himself up. Taking his fiddle from a black case, the man begins to play. With the northern lights dancing overhead, neighbors make their way to the Pepin cabin to dance inside. The fiddler played "all through the night, until they could dance no more." Just before dawn, the fiddler packs up his instrument. Stepping out of the cabin, he turns to the north and disappears into the woods.

Some of us have deep affection for the mountains and wilderness of northern New England. It's in the North Woods that city-dwelling Bostonians like me satisfy a craving for uneven skylines of spruces and white pines, perhaps as a backdrop to a mountain lake. However, it is books like The Fiddler of the Northern Lights that remind me of the whole Canadian province to the north of New England, namely Quebec. For Quebecois, you have to travel south to get to northern New England!

Saint-Maurice River Drainage Basin (From: Wikipedia)

The Fiddler is set in the forests of Quebec near the St. Maurice River. Today, the original headwaters and upper stretches of this river have been altered by the Gouin Reservoir. The reservoir was built in 1918 in order to control the river's flow and generate hydroelectric power at several points downstream. It is hard to say whether the setting of the story predates the dam or not. The stream pictured in the book is so placid as to be completely frozen over during the winter. Could this be the result of controlled water flow from the dam or is it just naturally so? In any case, much of the river today from the reservoir to its junction with the St. Lawrence River at Trois-Rivieres appears to be only a couple of hundred feet wide on average. One picture in the book depicts the St. Maurice as a very narrow stream, perhaps 30 feet or so. This makes me think of the some narrow streams I've canoed in the Adirondacks--the Osgood and Oswegatchie Rivers, for example.

Oswegatchie River in the Adirondack Mountains
of New York State (From:
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation)

The Gouin Reservoir is not much use as a tool for dating the story. But there is another way to date the setting. Many of the material goods in the cabin were manufactured to a relatively high quality. The chairs are perfectly identical; a craftsman could accomplish this, but could a family living in a cabin so distant from civilization afford a hand-made set of chairs like this? The wood stove likewise has the appearance of a modern manufactured stove. The family enjoys porcelain dishes. I doubt that one could find all of these goods in a mid-nineteenth century backwoods Quebec cabin. Yet, the Fiddler is clearly not a contemporary story either. Grandpa Pepin makes his ice skates from wood and barrel hoops! I would guess that the story is intended by Kinsey-Warnock to be set sometime around the turn of the twentieth century.

The neighbors' dancing to the fiddle deep into the night also bespeaks an earlier time. If there's anything that contemporary children do deep into the night, it's probably either video games or (I hope!) reading a good book. Occasionally, I see a picture of fiddle dancing like this in the newspaper. It usually has senior citizens smiling and enjoying the music as in ye olden times. Community fiddle dancing events were a wonderful way to spend time with neighbors during most of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, particularly in rural areas like the one in the Fiddler. There are similar scenes depicting the joy of rural fiddle dancing in Kathryn Lasky's Marven of the Great North Woods and in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods. 

If you see one of these, RUN!
(From: Wikipedia)

Grandpa Pepin tells Henry many old folktales of French-Canadian origin, the Fiddler being the foremost among them. Most folktales have a long and complex history as they are told with innumerable variations in different times and places. I was able to find at least one version of each story Grandpa Pepin tells. "Those Damned 'Marionettes'" has a fiddler named Fifi Labranche who becomes convinced by a protagonist, Lababiche, to take up the challenge of making the northern lights or "marionettes' dance to his music. His success in doing so casts a spell over him so that he cannot put the fiddle down or stop playing a tune called "Money Musk" (the above video) all night long. He collapses into unconsciousness by morning. He cannot lift an axe for three months afterwards because of his soreness.

Square dancing scene from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods.

"The White Owl" or "L'Hibou Blanc" is a French-Canadian legend about the dangerous supernatural powers of white owls. One version of this legend appears in storyteller Hazel Boswell's Legends of Quebec, From the Land of the Golden Dog. This version has four men setting off into the woods for a day of repair work on a sugarhouse. One of them is a scientifically-minded, factory worker American named Felix. Upon spotting a white owl, three of the men are spooked and immediately return home in hopes of avoiding the calamity traditionally associated with a sighting of the creature. Felix argues that such legends were "all nonsense. Old men's stories." Deliberately countering the legend, Felix decides to remain in the woods alone. The next morning, a search party goes in search of Felix because he had never returned for the night. He's discovered near the sugarhouse, dead under the weight of a fallen birch.

The legend of the loup-garou is probably the most well-known of the stories that Grandpa Pepin tells Henry. This is a terrifying half-man, half wolf creature. French-Canadian storyteller Louis Frechette relates one of many stories about this creature in his story collection, Christmas in French Canada (page 241). Frechette also explains in a footnote the central idea of the legend: "the loup-garou here, is not a sorcerer, but a victim of irreligion. A man who has been seven years without partaking of the Easter Sacrament falls a prey to the infernal power, and may be condemned to roam about every night in the shape and skin of a wolf, or any other kind of animal, according to the nature of his sins. A bloody wound only can release him." (242) Hmm... I wonder if Grandpa Pepin used the words "infernal" and "bloody wound" with Henry. 

Finally, Grandpa Pepin's story about rabbits dancing on moonlit nights is a worldwide legend. This tale of rabbits in the moonlight is similar to the story of Cinderella in that geographically disparate cultures around the world tell strangely similar versions of both stories. For as much as you'd probably ever like to know about rabbit folklore around the world, see blogger Terri Windling's post "The Folklore of Rabbits and Hares." Folklorists continue to puzzle over an explanation of this phenomenon of a folktale or legend that spans the globe. Of Cinderella, historian Robert Darnton writes, "Folkorists have recognized their tales in Herodotus and Homer, on ancient Egyptian papyruses and Chaldean stone tablets; and they have recorded them all over the world, in Scandinavia and Africa, among Indians on the banks of the Bengal and Indians along the Missouri. The dispersion is so striking that some have come to believe in Ur-stories and a basic Indo-European repertory of myths, legends, and tales." (The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, 21) Grandpa Pepin's dancing rabbits just might go back into Indo-European pre-history!

Now, shifting gears, how about those northern lights! The northern lights certainly do move as if they were dancing, though I don't think they move as fast as your average fiddle tune. Most videos of the northern lights available online are time-lapsed, so it's hard to get an idea of the original rapidity of their movement. Full confession: I have never seen the northern lights. My father says he used to see them sometimes while driving in northern New York. But he hasn't seen them there for a couple of decades. How I'd love to see this amazing display!

If you want to see the northern lights, you need to travel to either the North or South Poles. The magnetic field of the earth is weakest at these two points. The northern lights are caused by collisions between electrically charged particles emitted by the sun and gasses in the earth's atmosphere. Except at the poles, the earth's magnetic field does not allow the sun's particles to reach its atmosphere. The color produced by the collisions depends on the type of atmospheric gas involved. The most common color of the northern lights is green, which is caused by the combination of oxygen and the sun's particles. For more detailed explanation of the northern lights, see the Northern Lights Centre. 

The Fiddler of the Northern Lights is a picture book that tells the story of a special relationship between a boy and his grandfather in the backwoods of early twentieth-century Quebec. As often happens with this blogger, a story--the legend of a fiddler who make the northern lights dance--sparks their imagination to ask the questions, "What if this story were true? Can I imagine a world where this story is true or actually happened? What would that world be like?" These are the kinds of questions that make a person (or pair) set out ice-skating on a cold winter night in the wilderness! Of course, Grandpa Pepin and Henry did not ask these questions in the story, but one can easily imagine such questions running in their minds. I recommend this book for its feel of winter in the North Woods as well the cultural experience of French Canada. It reminds us that the northern lights are (or would be if I can ever manage to see them!) a magnificent phenomenon that inspire viewers with a sense of wonder.