The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories by Joan Aiken

First published: 1971; illustrated

Subjects: Animals, family, poverty, religion, and the supernatural

Type of work: Short fiction

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Form and Content

Joan Aiken’s The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories includes eleven stories based on folktales from Eastern Europe, three of which the author found in the collection Croatian Tales of Long Ago (1924), written by Ivana Berlic-Mazuranic and translated by F. S. Copeland. Two stories are adapted from Christian legend, and the remainder refer to local mythologies. The stories are accompanied by striking illustrations by Jan Pienkowski that employ silhouette figures; they are sometimes used as borders for the text, set against the white background of the pages, but they are given beautiful colorful backgrounds in the full-page plates.

Some of the stories carry conventional morals and were evidently designed for that purpose. These tales include, as one would expect, the two items of Christian legend. In “The Goose Girl,” Saint Peter asks to trade places with God for a day, so that he might savor the experience of absolute power, but discovers instead the burden of absolute responsibility. In “The Pear Tree,” the angel Gabriel, disguised as a poor man, receives charity from three brothers whose sole possession is a pear tree and offers all three a wish in return. The two who use their wishes to become wealthy are not so generous next time that the disguised angel calls, and they are restored to their former penury. The youngest, who only asked for a dutiful wife, has retained his simple virtues and is given further rewards.

The other conventional moral tale in the collection is “The King Who Declared War on the Animals,” in which an impoverished nobleman who looks after his animals well accumulates a whole set of humble liege-men, including such apparently useless servants as a mouse and a mole. When the nobleman incurs the wrath of a powerful king by marrying his daughter, however, the mouse and the mole call on their kinsmen to make the advance of the king’s army impossible.

Formal morals are also attached to “The Venetian Princess” and “The Golden-Fleeced Ram and the Hundred Elephants,” but they are less conventional. In the former story, a Serbian Tsar sets off to claim the hand of the daughter of the king of the Venetians, but he must nominate a champion to undertake various improbable tasks before he can do so. The tsar thinks that he has left all his nephews behind, but the least of them has tagged along unnoticed and completes the allotted tasks. “Woe to him who overlooks his own relations!” the conclusion of the tale proclaims. The latter story also involves an seemingly impossible task set by a king who is looking for an excuse to execute a subject whose golden-fleeced ram he covets. The young man in question finds a way to attract the hundred elephants whose tusks he requires to build an ivory tower, but he rebels against the necessity of slaughtering them and instead applies their strength to the destruction of the tyrant.

“Baba Yaga’s Daughter” combines the themes of the familiar stories of Cinderella and of Hansel and Gretel. Vasilissa, made miserable by the hatred of her stepmother and two stepsisters, befriends the daughter of the cannibal witch Baba Yaga. When the witch eventually finds the girl in her strange house—after several near misses—she tries to put her in the oven but is tricked and ends up there herself.

The remaining tales are less like those most carefully preserved in Western Europe and America. In “The Kingdom Under the Sea,” a fisherman asks Zora-djevojka the Dawn Maiden to show him the way to the sea-king’s palace, where he thinks he might be happy, but he finds that his reckless desire to reach it has spoiled the life he had. In “The Imprisoned Queen,” three brothers try to build a city but are frustrated by a vila, a wicked fairy. In order to complete their task, they must wall up the wife of the youngest son as a sacrifice. When her son grows up, he sets her free and the vila destroys the city. In “The Reed Girl,” a prince with a magic horse is helped by Zora-djevojka to obtain the reeds in which three beautiful girls are confined, but his carelessness kills two of them before he returns safely home with the third. In “The Sun’s Cousin,” the witch Mokosh—who is foster mother to the sun during the midwinter—befriends a generous miller’s daughter and tries to establish her as lady-in-waiting to the princess, but the girl prefers a different reward and marries the knight Oleg Ban. When the jealous princess sends an army to punish them, Mokosh refuses to help them. The sun, however, proves more generous than his mean foster mother.

Critical Context

The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories was the second collection of Joan Aiken’s stories to be illustrated by Jan Piénkowski, following A Necklace of Raindrops (1968), the contents of which were much more various. This collection benefits from the refinement of the artist’s technique as well as the utilization of stories from a common source; words and pictures are blended into a more coherent and more aesthetically satisfying whole. Many excellent collaborations between artists and storytellers of the first rank were produced during the 1970’s, taking advantage of cheap and efficient technologies of reproduction; The Kingdom Under the Sea and Other Stories is one of the landmark works displaying the potential that such works had.