In the Parcast Tales podcast, we get a closer look at secondary characters who had been overlooked in canon fairytales. Like the princesses spurned by the hero of H.C. Andersen's Princess and the Pea. Vanessa Richardson and her team chose to make one of them, called Sophia (maybe related to, or the same as?, the drugger in the Three Little Blue Stones/As Tres Pedrinhas Azuis character in January's installment on both Parcast and this blog) a true blue cobalt bluestocking, dyed in the wool with element 27 of the periodic table. However, there is something crucial missing from her well-stocked royal palace library that makes Prince Erik flinch:
Allons-y to her character introduction, shall we?
Next stop was Vordingborg (look it up on Google Maps, it's a real-life town!), where he'd had heard there was a princess who was a voracious reader.
Maybe she'd be perfect.
He thought Princess Sophia was even more graceful and well mannered than [a previous candidate, a hoyden].
Erik was confident that she could please his mother [a domineering queen] though.
[...]
"This is more," Erik thought, especially if she enjoyed books as much as him when they were done with dessert.
Erik asked if she would show him to her book collection. Princess Sophia clapped her hands excitedly.
When Erik stepped inside he gasped. The room was two stories, tall with shelves of leather-bound books that extended to the rafters. There was a large stone fireplace as big as a cave glowing and crackling with fragrant cedar logs. Erik had never seen a better, more inviting library.
He imagined all of the books were about knights on quests and adventures and love affairs. He was so thrilled. He wanted to propose marriage on the spot. He turned to Sophia:
"Which is your favourite book?"
She gestured to the room around them.
"Take your pick, my prince."
Erik wandered over to a bookshelf and thumbed through a few of the volumes, but they were not what he expected. Instead of romantic stories, they were arcane texts about alchemy and celestial observation.
"What are these?" he asked.
Sophia cocked her head at him and chuckled:
"Books, silly!"
Erik pulled more books off the shelves flipping off the pages, flipping through the pages desperately.
"Where are the novels about dragons... quests... love...?" he asked.
Sophia shrugged.
She didn't have any of those like such contrived tales. She preferred maths, science, and such academic subjects.
Erik's heart sank. He couldn't imagine a library full of books without stories. It made him shudder.
Maybe Sophia wasn't the perfect wife for him.
He thanked her for dinner and trudged out out of the castle.
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Later out, when he meets the heroine Margaret, a kindred spirit of his who carries a fiction novel at hand, he has this dialogue with her:
[...] he told her about [...] Sophia with the library full of books, but no stories [...]
After all, not everyone may know arsenic is number 33 on the periodic table but you should know it can burn away at your insides just like a very persistent and negative intrusive thought,
Iago dixit.
The same goes for gold, silver, and lead, on Portia's caskets... From Shakespeare to Christie and beyond, literature has needed science for the substances and illnesses and injuries that affect its characters. Lives were saved because the Pale Horse by Christie employed obscure thallium when she had used strychnine and arsenic and every other substance in the book and turned to little-known thallium, then it inspired other real-life psychos in turn...
The keyword is consiliency, the marriage of the arts and sciences!
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