“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” is a Victorian fairy poem and, coincidentally, O.G. To T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In this context, ‘childe’ refers to a young man who has not been knighted. He is a modern young adult.
In this poem, Roland is having a pretty crappy time. But he perseveres on a hopeless journey because, like many a modern young adult character, “naught else remained to do”.
What else does this old poem by Robert Browning have to do with modern young adult characters?
For this one you must go to Iceland. Once in Iceland, get your hands on a magical text full of spells and suchlike, a.k.a. Icelandic grimoires. But to save you the trouble, refer to the recipe below.
You’ll need a magical rune stave. There is literally a rune stave for every possible thing you can imagine up.
The invisibility run stave looks a bit like a snowflake. The one you need is called the hulinhjalmur. Google it.
I’m sure you can recreate that with a marker on paper. Hold your horses, it’s not that simple though. You must engrave this rune stave onto a piece of lignite using magnetic steel that’s been hardened by soaking in human blood.
Be careful how you blend the blood. You need three drops from the index finger of the left hand and three from the ring finger of the right hand. Worse, you also need two drops from the right nipple and one from the left.
Next you need an alive raven. Don’t kill it. You will need to extract six drops of blood, though, straight from the raven’s heart.
Melt it all down, along with the raven’s brain and parts of a human stomach. I’m not actually sure if the raven’s still meant to be alive at this point. I assume the human is not.
Now you should be invisible. Bear in mind, there may be rune staves for picking locks, keeping the butter from going rancid and for protecting yourself against ghosts but there is no rune stave to make you un-invisible. This is your life now. I hear Iceland is beautiful.
Method 2: The Witch Way
Are you a witch? Do you want to be a witch? Let’s be witches. We’re going to Papua New Guinea for this one, where witches have the power to see inside others, and also have the power to become invisible. The best of both worlds. In PNG there is a concept known as gwumu. This refers to a spirit which can live in people, rendering them invisible. (There are also evil spirits, known as sanguma or spirit nogut in Tok Pisin. They came to the world via pigs. Look, it says so in the Bible.)
In other countries, witches don’t become invisible per se, they simply transmogrify themselves into other animals, like ravens. No one thinks twice about a particularly witchy-looking raven flying across the sky at night, right? As ravens, witches are free to attend their moonlit sabbats.
But in the Papua New Guinea highlands, witches don’t bother with the faff of transmogrification. They can, I mean, if they want. They might become a quick, highly mobile creatures: bat, rat, bird, moth, grasshopper, butterfly, cicada… or they might simply become invisible.
Odilon Redon, Butterflies, before 1909, oil on canvas
Let’s do that. That way, we can go about our supernatural lives alongside regulars and we don’t have to worry about a thing.
Except for one thing: We will still be blamed for the following:
Ninja techniques for hiding are called ongyo-jutsu (隠形術), the way of the hidden form.
When sneaking in the dark, slow your movement.
Stop moving if someone is facing you.
Camouflage yourself
Hide in the shadows
Make yourself small e.g. crouch in the shape of a quail (for some reason)
If you have white skin, hide your white face
Be mindful of light sources
Standing in front of a wall or tree may be more effective than you think, because the enemy is busy looking behind rocks and whatnot. Only works if you’re camouflaged and hiding your big white face
Don’t accidentally breathe on your enemy
Be absolutely silent
Risk making noise only while other noise is happening
Use a throw cloth to muffle your footsteps
Bring an animal e.g. a rat to let loose and distract a sentry
Stand downwind of guard dog snoots
Or hide under water making use of a snorkel
Throw down a toothpick to attract the enemy’s attention. While they’re glancing at the toothpick you’ll be able to hide.
Here’s Courage The Cowardly Dog hiding in a toilet. Courage is often hiding inside things.
1999 in picture books was the year of monsters in the forest. Jez Alborough was finishing up his bear series about a massive toy bear, actually harmless. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler released their phenomenal hit The Gruffalo. Rufus and the Blackberry Monster by Lisa Stubbs is part of the same family. Comparisons between this story and The Gruffalo are inevitable — both picture books feature young animal characters who are warned of a big, bad monster in the woods. Is the monster real or isn’t it? This is saved as the big reveal. The young characters must muster up courage.
Is fairy land real? Some children’s stories would like us to think so. Their endings contain a ‘wink’, encouraging readers to carry the possibility of fantasy lands with them, even after the story draws to a close. This is one way of achieving resonance. We might argue this is a cheap trick.
Enter Richard Dawkins, who wrote The Magic of Reality partly as an antidote to magical thinking, which he famously despises. His main argument? Reality is far more interesting than anything fiction writers can make up. In this he is probably right.
