The world uncertain is, and full of many wonders: among them, we possess a plethora of works that acknowledge the conventions of the fairy tale form, and subvert them. Princesses who know that they are bound to their repugnant duties of simpering and being victimized choose to save themselves, as in Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest chronicles: sorceresses fulfilling their malignant duties as much out of obligation as anything else are caught in their own spells, as in Tanith Lee's The Dragon Hoard, and characters assured of success or failure on the basis of their birth order turn convention on its head, as in Dianna Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle. All of these, and many more besides, play with story. In Patricia McKillip's recent novel In the Forests of Serre, however, McKillip draws a clever distinction: her magical characters aren't playing with the story; they are Story itself. This becomes particularly clear in our encounters with the witch Brume, one of the main provocateurs of the story, who is based in large part upon the Russian witch, Baba Yaga. In In the Forests of Serre, McKillip plays upon many of the themes associated with Baba Yaga in her use of the Yaga-esque characteristics attributed to her Brume, who is also known, tantalizingly, as the Mother of All Witches, a title historically given to mythical figures as diverse as Hecate and Lilith, possessing power as their common denominator. Like Baba Yaga, Brume is a living genus locci for the values and associations that attach themselves to the archetype of "the witch in the forest." In both characters, there is a back-and-forth between their status as specific named figures and between their more general, overriding qualities as archetypes. McKillip takes her creation beyond that dynamic in a very conscious play on the transformative elements that permeate the tropes of the witch's tale, using Brume as a synecdoche for the magic of the fairy tale, which both remains static from tale to tale, and is reborn anew with each telling. Simply put, McKillip presents the subtle argument that the character of Baba Yaga, as an unusually ambiguous archetypal witch, can be read as a mainstay of the codified image of the witch, and the witch as an avatar of magic can be read as the mainstay of Story, and fairy stories in particular. McKillip highlights the liminal nature of the witch as one who initiates the insertion of magic into the mainstream world of the mundane, and the interpolatory nature of her character as a meta-narrative commentary upon the ways in which stories influence one another in endless rounds of self-referential critiques ... a very pertinent issue in today's world of post-modernism, and one very significant to readings of both folklore and modern fantasy. One of the most well known figures from Russian folklore, Baba Yaga's name can be roughly translated as "Granny Yaga." Baba Yaga brings many of the dominant themes of Russian fairy tales together: she travels on the wind, occupies the domain of the leshii, the forest spirits, is associated with death, and is an acceptable surrogate for the generic ved'ma, or witch. She possesses gnashing steel teeth, and penetrating eyes, and, in short, is quite enough to intimidate even the most courageous hero or heroine. Like the witches of other cultures, her preferred method of transportation is an implement commonly used for household labor, though unlike the witches of the West, rather than traveling upon a broom, she chooses to ride in a mortar, rowing with a pestle, and using a broom to sweep away the tracks that she leaves. Her home is a mobile hut perched upon chicken legs, which Vladimir Propp suggests isrelated to the zoomorphic izbushkii, or initiation huts, where neophytes were symbolically "consumed" by the monster, only to emerge later as adults. The hut itself is surrounded by a gate of bone, hung with the skulls of her enemies. Baba Yaga's domain is the forest, widely acknowledged as a tradition
