This week I read Princess of the Silent Moor, a beautiful fairy-tale retelling by the incredibly talented Brittany Fichter. While I’m writing up my review for this story that captured my heart, I asked the author herself to tell us about the book, and shed some light about the fairy-tale that it is based on.
Thank you, Brittany, for agreeing to guest post! This book is one of my new favorites! Purchase the book here!
Princess of the Silent Moor is a fairy tale I fell in love with while still in elementary school-probably because it’s not told in the typical linear format that most fairy tales share. We see a sad, sweet girl isolated with an old woman on a lonely moor, and a poor, besotted dwarf who wants to save her. Despite falling far short of the stereotypical fairy tale hero, as his body is weak and his tongue has been kept mute for as long as he can remember, this dwarf has the courage to save the girl when given the chance… despite losing what little strength he has. But that’s when we find the delicious twist at the end, and we learn that not all is as it seems. Nor has it been for a long time.
The idea that the fairy tale had a secret beginning always intrigued and tortured me. I wanted to go back and know what had happened before the beginning of the tale, when the main characters’ lives had been so different. How did they get to the place where the story begins? How did they reconcile their beginning and their end emotionally?
Aside from searching for the answers to those questions, my next challenge was figuring out how to fix this-admittedly gory-story into my fairy tale world. I wanted to retain the true depth of the dwarf character’s sacrifice without cheapening it… and without grossing out my audience. And, of course, there was the issue of the odd little man who acts as a somewhat antagonizing fairy godfather character throughout the middle of the story. I never really liked him as a character, but the story doesn’t happen without him.
Fixing this problem was really a delight. I decided to bring back a few beloved characters from my original fairy tale, Before Beauty: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast. This gave me the chance to provide the help to the main characters that they needed without fixing the problem via Deus Ex Machina. Basically, I couldn’t have the powerful stranger be so strong that he could simply snap his fingers and fix the problem on his own. It was from here that I built out the rest of the story.
As for the characters, Finola was particularly fun to write. Our family was going through a very stressful time (military life stuff) while I was writing this book, so I lived somewhat vicariously through Finola as I wrote her. Her lack of a verbal filter was particularly fun when I had to bite my tongue and take deep breaths. Declan, on the other hand, was always solid and steady. His character had to be in order to sacrifice for Finola the way he would one day need to.
The Story I Wanted
I had another challenge with Finola as well. As readers, we like to cheer for characters who are proactive. But in the original story, the princess is basically imprisoned on a moor and has little opportunity to fight back against those who have imprisoned her. But I also firmly believe that we don’t have to actively wield a sword or shout at people in order to do something good. We can be brave even in the smallest things. Finola is a free spirit, and throughout the beginning of her life, she actively seeks ways to protect her kingdom from the evil she senses on the horizon. But when it comes down to brass tacks, Finola’s greatest strength is her faithfulness.
Faithfulness is an undervalued virtue in our society-that willingness to stay true to what’s right even when everyone around us is shouting that we’re wrong, or encouraging us to act against our conscience. If we peer back through history and examine all the people who moved mountains, we often find the seed of faithfulness at the very core. And sometimes, that faithfulness wasn’t even their own. It belonged to their mother or father, or a grandparent, or someone else they knew. Our society today often tries to cancel people if they don’t conform to the image society believes they ought to take, and it takes a great deal of courage to remain faithful to what one knows is true.
I think my final favorite thing about this story was getting to feature the “knight in shining armor” trope. And yes, I know it can be cliche. But there’s a reason we fantasy readers are still touched by that overly-shared image of a beautiful woman knighting a man in armor. You know the one I’m talking about. We want to see someone who is good and true riding into danger with his sword drawn. With the news as unpleasant as it often is today, we long for heroes who are honorable and trustworthy, and that hero in this story is Declan.
Between my Classical Kingdoms Collection books, Nevertold Fairy Tales, Entwined Tales book, children’s fairy tales, Clara’s Soldier, My Air Force Fairy Tales, and more, I’ve written over two dozen fairy tale retellings or fairy tale-inspired stories. But I can honestly say that Princess of the Silent Moor is one of my very favorites, despite its shorter length. Writing this book was kind of like stepping back into childhood and handing that hungry little reader the story she wanted so desperately to find. By God’s grace, I somehow wrote it over the length of our crazy summer. And I hope and pray now that despite all that chaos, it’s given other readers the very story they were hungering for as well.
Visit Brittany’s website here, and be sure to check out her books. She has a magical way of spinning stories that feature characters who creep into one’s heart!
-Mariella
Mariella Hunt 
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