Morsel of the Day: C. S. Lewis

No April Fool's today. So how about a fairy tale morsel from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

My Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

From C. S. Lewis's letter to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield in the preface to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Morsel of the Day: Maps for Coping

Although fairy tales are still arguably the most powerfully formative tales of childhood and permeate mass media for children and adults, it is not unusual to find them deemed of marginal cultural importance and dismissed as unworthy of critical attention. Yet the staying power of these stories, their widespread and enduring popularity, suggests that they must be addressing issues that have a significant social function—whether critical, conservative, compensatory, or therapeutic. In a study of mass-produced fantasies for women, Tania Modleski points out that genres such as the soap opera, the Gothic novel, and the Harlequin romance “speak to very real problems amid tensions in women’s lives. The narrative strategies which have evolved for smoothing over these tensions can tell us much about how women have managed not only to live in oppressive circumstances but to invest their situations with some degree of dignity.” Fairy tales register an effort on the part of both women and men to develop maps for coping with personal anxieties, family conflicts, social frictions, and the myriad frustrations of everyday life.

From the introduction to The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions) by Maria Tatar

Morsel of the Day: Not My Escape

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality--for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.

by Terri Windling in "Surviving Childhood" in The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors

Morsel of the Day: Beauty and the Beast as a Popular Tale

Besides its wide appeal over time and space, we might note who this story especially speaks to. Over the years, I have asked people from all walks of life to identify their favorite works of literature; I’ve taken surveys, and some of the results have appeared in print. When I’ve asked people about their favorite fairy tale, one story consistently emerges as the most popular: “Cinderella.” But when the answers are divided by the gender of the respondents, after “Cinderella,” the second most popular fairy tale among women is “Beauty and the Beast.” Women tell me they love the tale because of its vision of feminine empowerment in the way Beauty tames the huge and formidable Beast and changes him into a gentleman, because it offers them the hope that in their own love lives they might be able to do the same, and because (they sometimes reluctantly admit) they are drawn to the erotic notion of the beastly lover.

But that’s not to suggest that men don’t find “Beauty and the Beast” an appealing tale. in my own experience, however, men have been less candid in describing the story’s attraction to them, but part of the reason may be, as W. R. Ralston has observed, that “many a plain man has been secretly consoled by the favorable impression produced upon [the story’s heroine] by its unprepossessing hero.”

by Jerry Griswold, from his introduction to The Meanings of "Beauty & The Beast" A Handbook

Morsel of the Day: Fairy stories are everywhere and every-day

A KIND enchantress one day put into my hand a mystic volume prettily lettered and bound in green, saying, "I am so fond of this book. It has all the dear old fairy tales in it; one never tires of them. Do take it."

I carried the little book away with me, and spent a very pleasant quiet evening at home by the fire, with H. at the opposite corner, and other old friends, whom I felt I had somewhat neglected of late. Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots, the gallant and quixotic Giant-killer, and dearest Cinderella, whom we every one of us must have loved, I should think, ever since we first knew her in her little brown pinafore: I wondered, as I shut them all up for the night between their green boards, what it was that made these stories so fresh and so vivid. Why did not they fall to pieces, vanish, explode, disappear, like so many of their contemporaries and descendants? And yet far from being forgotten and passing away, it would seem as if each generation in turn as it came into the world looks to be delighted still by the brilliant pageant, and never tires or wearies of it. And on their side the princes and princesses never seem to grow any older; the castles and the lovely gardens flourish without need of repair or whitewash, or plumbers or glaziers. The princesses' gowns, too—sun, moon, and star-colour,—do not wear out or pass out of fashion or require altering. Even the seven-leagued boots do not appear to be the worse for wear. Numbers of realistic stories for children have passed away. Little Henry and his Bearer, and Poor Harry and Lucy, have very nearly given up their little artless ghosts and prattle, and ceased making their own beds for the instruction of less excellently brought-up little boys and girls, and notwithstanding a very interesting article in the Saturday Review, it must be owned that Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton are not familiar playfellows in our nurseries and school-rooms, and have passed somewhat out of date. But not so all these centenarians—Prince Riquet, Carabas, Little Red Riding-hood, Bluebeard and others. They seem as if they would never grow old. They play with the children, they amuse the elders, there seems no end to their fund of spirits and perennial youth.

H., to whom I made this remark, said from the opposite chimney-corner, "No wonder; the stories are only histories of real living persons turned into fairy princes and princesses. Fairy stories are everywhere and every-day. We are all princes and princesses in disguise, or ogres or wicked dwarfs. All these histories are the histories of human nature, which does not seem to change very much in a thousand years or so, and we don't get tired of the fairies because they are so true to it."

After this little speech of H.'s, we spent an unprofitable half-hour reviewing our acquaintance, and classing them under their real characters and qualities. We had dined with Lord Carabas only the day before and met Puss in Boots—Beauty and the Beast were also there; we uncharitably counted up, I am ashamed to say, no less than six Bluebeards. Jack and. the Beanstalk we had met just starting on his climb. A Red Riding-hood; a girl with toads dropping from her mouth: we knew three or four of each. Cinderellas—alas! who does not know more than one dear, poor, pretty Cinderella? and, as for sleeping Princesses in the Woods, how many one can reckon up! Young, old, ugly, pretty, awakening, sleeping still.

from “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” in Five Old Friends (1875) by Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Morsel of the Day: The Ethics of Fairy Tales

If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow. Bluebeard's wife may open all doors but one. A promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him; she sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition she does not open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her. A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the earth.

by G. K. Chesterton in All Things Considered

Morsel of the Day: A Sense of the Numinous

My own definition of fairy tale goes something like this: A fairy tale is a story-literary or folk-that has a sense of the numinous, the feeling or sensation of the supernatural or the mysterious. But, and this is crucial, it is a story that happens in the past tense, and a story that is not tied to any specifics. If it happens "at the beginning of the world," then it is a myth. A story that names a specific "real" person is a legend (even if it contains a magical occurrence). A story that happens in the future is a fantasy. Fairy tales are sometimes spiritual, but never religious.

by Marcia Lane in Picturing a Rose: A Way of Looking at Fairy Tales

Morsel of the Day: On Fairy Stories

I said the sense "stories about fairies" was too narrow. It is too narrow, even if we reject the diminutive size, for fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

The definition of a fairy-story -- what it is, or what it should be -- does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole. Yet I hope that what I have later to say about the other questions will give some glimpses of my own imperfect vision of it. For the moment I will say only this: a "fairy-story" is one which touches on or uses Faërie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faërie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic - but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.

by J. R. R. Tolkien in "On Fairy Stories" in Tree and Leaf

Morsel of the Day: A Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale

In his first short monograph, [Jens] Tismar set down the principles for a definition of the literary fairy tale (das Kunstmarchen) as genre: (1) it distinguishes itself from the oral folk tale (das Volksmarchen) in so far as it is written by a single identifiable author; (2) it is thus synthetic, artificial, and elaborate in comparison to the indigenous formation of the folk tale that emanates from communities and tends to be simple and anonymous; (the differences between the literary fairy tale and the oral folk tale do not imply that one genre is better than the other; (in fact, the literary fairy tale is not an independent genre but can only be understood and defined by its relationship to the oral tales as well as to the legend, novella, novel, and other literary fairy tales that it uses, adapts, and remodels during the narrative conception of the author.

by Jack Zipes, "Introduction: Towards the Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale" in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

Morsel of the Day: Fairy Tales Are Easier to Illustrate Than Define

Fairytales, as we have come to recognise them, are perhaps easier to illustrate than to define: we tend to use the term loosely to mean ‘tales like Cinderella or Snow White’, and leave it at that. The term itself is as old as the late seventeenth century, appearing as the title of Mme d’Aulnoy’s Contes de fées in 1698, whereas the broader term folktale does not arrive till the early nineteenth century. A reasonable definition might however ask for ‘short, imaginative, traditional tales with a high moral and magical content’, essentially the qualities offered by the German term Maerchen, with its association with the world of Grimms’ fairytales. Such definitions are all too often doomed to admit exceptions: almost the first thing the first acknowledged modern European Cinderella does is murder her stepmother! But they are useful, nonetheless, and this one may be allowed to stand. The same vagueness as we might have about the definition of fairytales also tends to provide us with the assumption that they are somehow ‘timeless’ without actually being ‘old’. The assumption, too, that fairytales are somehow the province of children seems somehow to disqualify them from existing in antiquity, precisely because we tend to take it for granted that there were no children in antiquity — of the kind we somehow take for granted as the audience, readers or viewers of fairytale.

by Graham Anderson
From the introduction to Fairytale in the ancient world, p. 1

Morsel of the Day: Told by a Real Person

A special pleasure arises from coming to terms, even if only partially, with the special qualities of each version of a tale within its own context, of fathoming the reasons for the impressive constancy in the basic outlines of many stories across the centuries, and of seeking to account for the equally perplexing variations that can sometimes occur. Abstract arguments can be helpful in disproving the notion that there can be a pure fairy tale form in which no adjustments to immediate cultural needs or pressures have taken place and in which no ulterior motive has prompted the telling and influenced the shaping of the story. But the best support for such reasoning may be to let a variety of tales speak for themselves. They tell us that fairy tales can and should he approached at more than one different angle. They lend weight to the view of the Italian philosopher, historian, and critic Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) that we possess only specific tellings of the tales and that we must analyze these tellings rather than hypothesize about what does not exist. Croce argued strenuously against what he regarded as arbitrary theories about Indian origins, primitive origins, and so forth of fairy tales. In analyzing individual tellings, we need to be as attentive as possible to the particularities of context, since whether a tale is recounted orally or written, it is told by a real person at a particular point in history. These tellers have their own personalities, time periods, sexes, social classes, and multiple communities.

by Jan M. Ziolkowski
From the introduction to Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies, p. 7

Morsel of the Day: The Literary Fairy Tale

From The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: Introduction by Jack Zipes, p. xi-xii:

Since we know that many different kinds of storytelling existed in antiquity before oral wonder tales came into existence, and since we know that there were many kinds of wondrous oral and literary tales that served to form the hybrid “species” of the literary fairy tale, we can trace a historical evolution of all these tales by examining how bits and pieces of story accumulated in different cultures and then eventually gelled to form a genre. We cannot say with historical precision when the literary fairy tale evolved, but we can trace motifs and elements of the literary fairy tale to numerous types of storytelling and stories of antiquity that contributed to the formation of a particular branch of telling and writing tales. In the western European tradition, this branching occurred sometime in the fourteenth century and fifteenth centuries and led to a special literary genre in the sixteenth century that we today call the literary fairy tale.