#etherial

Fairest of All 🪞

This week’s tale draws us deep into the shadowed woods with Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Brothers Grimm classic translated by Randall Jarrell and illustrated with chilling beauty by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. Published in 1973 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, this is no softened bedtime tale. Here, jealousy festers, danger waits in disguise, and innocence flickers like a fragile flame.

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was an acclaimed American poet, novelist, critic, and essayist. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate (then called Consultant in Poetry) to the Library of Congress. Though best known for his war poetry, Jarrell also turned his pen to children’s literature. In this translation, Jarrell preserves the tale’s severity while weaving in a rhythm and poetry that make its edges gleam all the sharper.

Nancy Ekholm Burkert (b. 1933) is an American artist whose style evokes Renaissance painting and dreamlike realism, capturing innocence and menace with equal power. Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs earned a Caldecott Honor, placing her among the most celebrated illustrators in American children’s literature. Her Snow-White is ethereal, fragile, and luminous, while each illustration heightens the story’s gothic intensity, echoing the Grimm tradition of fairy tales as cautionary, perilous, and strange. 

So, beware the silence of the forest, the whispers of a mirror, the gleam of a crimson apple. Fairy tales are never only sweet… sometimes, they bite.

Our copy is a gift of Megan Holbrook and Eric Vogel.

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Alleria was constantly moody with Locus Walker throughout the story and in the end severed her ties with him, denouncing him as an ally, teacher and friend. Now one thing that struck me was when she said he's not longer her friend, Locus Walker tries reaching out and very mournfully calls out her. The reason I found this moment meaningful is cause he's a Void Etherial, essentially a being infused and made up of Void, and one known characteristic of the Void is that it doesn't understand the bonds between mortals, and it will do everything in its power to make the user cut and sever their ties with their loved ones.

If my memory serves correct, Locus Walker himself even used to tell Alleria how her connection to her family holds her from unlocking her true potential and how she needs to let go of them back when he was still her fresh teacher. So to now hear him sound rather heartbroken and mournful over her ending their bond really shows how fond he had grown of her and that even an individual so connected to the Void, isn't immune to the emotions that can blossom between people.

𝓓𝓲𝓰𝓲𝓽𝓪𝓵 𝓒𝓵𝓸𝓾𝓭 𝓢𝓬𝓪𝓹𝓮𝓼

𝔄𝔲𝔡𝔯𝔢𝔶 𝔇𝔬𝔶𝔩𝔢

𝔦𝔫𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔤𝔯𝔞𝔪: 𝔞𝔲𝔡𝔯𝔢𝔶.𝔞𝔢𝔪𝔟𝔢𝔯