East

The Origins of East

By Edith Pattou

The novel East is based on the Norwegian fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." I first read the story as a child, in one of the Andrew Lang fairy books. I loved the heroine, a spunky unnamed girl who was brave enough to ride on the back of a great white bear and then ride the East, West, South, and North Winds. I admired her unyielding spirit, her tenacity, and the sureness of her love for the enchanted prince she was so determined to save. But I came to write East in a rather roundabout way.

I had been working for several months on a book that was to be a humorous, satiric fantasy about two kids who come across a portal that leads them into the landscapes of all the different fairy tales. I had the story mapped out but came grinding to a halt, suffering from an advanced case of writer's block. There was one part of the story that I kept returning to in my thoughts, the part when the two children enter the land of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." And suddenly it struck me that that was the story I really wanted to tell.

When I started to write East, I had recently finished the book The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I loved her use of various voices to tell the story, and I decided that would be an intriguing way to tell the tale of East. (It turned out to be quite a challenge, trying to keep each voice distinct, and in the editing process, even more of a challenge to keep them all straight. I wound up having to storyboard the book on a large table in my basement to keep track of all the different threads of the story.)

I did a great deal of research in the course of writing East. I had to become an expert of sorts in many disparate areas, such as: weaving, compasses, mapmaking and its history, seamanship, Scandinavian languages, Norway in the sixteenth century, the Inuit people, Norse mythology, everything to do with the Arctic, and of course, polar bears. Our local zoo doesn't have any polar bears, so I traveled to Chicago to observe one. As I stood watching and taking notes about the large male polar bear, a family came up to the railing beside me and I heard one of the children say, "Oh, he looks so lonely!" Which summed up my white bear perfectly: lonely and waiting.

I also had the opportunity to travel in Norway while I was writing East, and I journeyed by ship through the fjords. It was summer rather than winter, but it gave me a sense of the grandeur and immense quiet of the fjords. I visited a summer farm near Andalsnes, which provided a model for Rose's family farm. The trolls one finds in souvenir shops in Norway, as well as in traditional Scandinavian folklore, were nothing like the ones I created for my story. But in researching Norwegian folktales, I came across stories about a race of trolls called the Huldre, who were beautiful and clever rather than ugly and stupid, though they did have tails that they kept hidden under clothing.

The ending of East came together almost magically, like the final pieces of a difficult jigsaw puzzle. I had constructed the plot to take place in the 1500s, had located the castle in the mountain in France to which the white bear takes Rose, and had decided that the Troll Queen would substitute a shape-shifted troll to die in the place of a young prince of France one hundred years earlier. Though I was fully prepared to make up such a character, I thought it would be cool if by some chance there really was a French prince who died at a young age in that general time period. So I was looking through history books, and my eye was caught by a chance phrase in Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century referring to King Charles and Queen Isabeau's fifth child, a son born in 1392 who died at age nine. When I finally tracked down the name of this boy, it was Charles, which happens to be my husband's name. It was eerie the way it all came together, almost as if it was fated. But now I'm sounding like Rose's mother, and I can hear Rose's dad tell me it is all nonsense.