John Ruskin was an interesting character. He pops up in all kinds of stories and biographies that I have read of other men and women: everyone from Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti to Lewis Carroll to Lillias Trotter. Several biographical pages on the internet call him a “polymath, a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning.” He was a noted art critic who encouraged many of the finest artists of the late Victorian era, including Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelites. He wrote and published essays, poetry, literary and art criticism, travel guides, biography, and one simple fairy tale, The King of the Golden River.

Ruskin wrote his only work of fiction in response to a challenge that had been put to him by twelve year old Effie Gray. (Ruskin later married Miss Effie, but that’s another story.) She asked him to write a fairy tale, and in 1840, the twenty-one year old Ruskin wrote The King of the Golden River. The story is that of three brothers, the older two, Swartz and Hans, mean and greedy and the youngest brother, Gluck, “as completely opposed, in both appearance and character, to his seniors as could possibly be imagined or desired.” The Black Brothers, as they are called by the people living nearby, live in a marvelously fruitful valley called Treasure Valley. The story tells how Treasure Valley becomes a wasteland because of the curse of the King of the Golden River, and how it is redeemed by the kindness and gentle love of Gluck.

“And thus the Treasure Valley became a garden again, and the inheritance, which had been lost by cruelty, was regained by love.”

Episode #70 of the Literary Life podcast, Why Read Fairy Tales?, would be an excellent one to listen to in juxtaposition to the reading of this literary fairy tale by John Ruskin. Maybe read Ruskin’s tale, then listen to Why Read Fairy Tales?, and then read Ruskin’s little story again, as I plan to do. It’s a short story that will well repay a second reading.