Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 30 December 2011

Fairy Tales

A popular definition of a fairy tale is on the lines of “a fanciful tale of legendary deeds and creatures”. Many, if not most, go beyond this. Derek Brewer, an expert on fairy tales, explains in The Companion to the Fairy Tale (Eds, Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudry) that the fairy story is a moral tale, built on an underlying symbolic structure. Any modern reader of the Grimms’ collection will notice how important is the subject of food (magic tables and the like), and the passion to have children. The implicit model of agrarian society still offers plenty of scope for the expression of human needs. The nuclear family is the cast of the dramas, with the constant need of the young to go outside it to find themselves and a mate.

So, symbolically, the fairy story often has a sexual as well as non-sexual meaning, the sexual element being considered improper. Leslie Fiedler suggested that a “persistent awareness of the demonic and erotic substrata of the fairy tale made its survival difficult in the nineteenth century”. The sexual meaning is fully conscious, but expression of it would offend social decorum, so it is ignored, yet everyone, even children, knows it is there. Through the fairy tale, people can relate decently what everybody knows has a private sexual meaning. So, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, writers were using fairy tale conventions superficially to teach morals. Humpty Dumpty is not an egg, nor masculine! It is a little girl who is plump because she is pregnant. Little Red Riding Hood warns innocent little girls against sexual predators—wolves until recently, and perhaps still in some places.

Not only those, they can have other warnings. Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, 1981) wrote:

From about 1800 onwards, those fantasies produced within a capitalist economy express some of the debilitating psychological effects of inhabiting a materialistic culture. They are peculiarly violent and horrific.

Structural Elements

Axel Olrik was the first to show the fairy tale had a distinct robust structure which is and, indeed cannot be, corrupted without destroying the tale entirely. This structure was charted by the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp in his classic study Morphology of the Folktale (1968).

The general fairy tale structure involves such elements as falling in love, a wonderful palace, a broken interdiction, a quest by the lover for her beloved, tests of persistence and endurance, magic helpers, a happy ending in marriage, all reflecting deeply rooted desires and experiences of ordinary people, particularly the crucial passages in our lives from adolescence to young maturity, pairing with another person of the opposite sex, and starting a family. Roger Sale (Fairy Tales and After) illustrates this in the case of the basic wish for a child, and the basic fear, that there will be no child.

In former times, especially among the poor, whose food was inadequate, women came to puberty late, in their late teens or early twenties. Women would be married for several years with no prospect of them giving birth because they were not ovulating as yet. Birth therefore was a subject of some anxiety, more so, as children often died at birth or young anyway. It is a folklore motif that knows no borders. A couple, but especially the wife, wants a child. In the tale, something must happen—blood must flow, as it must But usually, an enchanted animal makes the announcement that the wish will be granted:

• In Snow White (German) a queen pricks her finger and wishes for a child
• In Rapunzel (German) a couple wish for a child until a witch announces a child will be born
• In The Sleeping Beauty (German) a frog announces to the wife while she is bathing that she will become pregnant
• The Goose Girl (German) opens with a child and mother, and the mother bequeaths three drops of blood to the daughter as she sets out to find her prince
• The White Deer (French) opens with a wife being told by a shrimp that she will have a child, and the shrimp then turns into a handsome old woman
• Kip, the Enchanted Cat (Russian) starts with a queen and a cat, and the cat has a kitten before she tells the queen she too will have a baby.

Many incidents are capable of symbolic, though not particularly mysterious, interpretation. In the story of “The Frog King”, to take an obvious example, the frog represents the repellent aspects of sexuality and the reconciling effect of love—a message similar to that of the many versions of “Beauty and the Beast”. Such interpretations rely on the fairy tale’s narrative power beautifying and making significant what is in itself a platitude.

The teller is often identified with some character in the tale, but they are not self conscious, so do not intrude as a narrator to comment or interpret. Fairy tale is an art cultivated by the poor, perhaps founded in lost religions, solar myths. It may be why they are almost absent from Classical and early cultures. But the stories express the experiences and aspirations of the poor, though the focal point of the story was the marvellous. People anticipated certain motifs or characters or events without ever insisting that one way of telling a story was the only way or the right way. The tales were truly communal. Indeed, when local communities were small and families isolated, the stories served the function of making children aware of the metacommunity beyond the one they knew.

Dream and Reality

Neil Philip, in the same compendium, notes fairy tales in particular seek to hold a balance between reality and dream. No fairy tale distinguishes real from unreal or fantasy from fact. In a fairy tale, a girl escaping from an ogre may toss a comb, or a mirror, behind her. It becomes a forest or a lake. In the logic of such a narrative, thought itself is magically potent. Some people even believed that fairy tales were true, providing an imaginative release, a “make believe” universe, a stimulus to day dreaming what might be so. But the fairy story is not a solipsistic day dream. It is a real reaching out to the external world, and to some other one.

Daydreaming may be an expression of frustration and weakness, of deprivation and lack of power, especially in the poor. But the popularity of fairy tale, with its frequent expression of wish fulfilment, reflects a deeper imaginative need, and a deeper hope. More modern scientific investigation of the working of the mind shows that daydreaming is a common human characteristic and that in many cases it strengthens the imagination, creating positive mental images, leading to more general activity.

While daydreaming may be merely compensatory, or even a distraction from the necessary task in hand, it is also a valuable imaginative and intellectual resource, and the tales are not merely escapist. The role of daydreaming as exploring the future, elaborating the sense of possibility, is well known. Imaginative stories make children more imaginative. Children with low fantasy levels are less imaginative in responses to new situations and people, and are more aggressive.

The importance of the projection of future possibilities in stories explains why small children can be absorbed in, learn from, and understand, through fantasy, real life situations that arise in later years, like desires for food, wealth, adventure, companionship, family relations and conflicts. These general aspects and many motifs are unquestionably ancient in society and, as the story of Cinderella shows, are widespread throughout the world.

These stories are not a release from unrecognized repression, and the literal surface meaning does not obscure further symbolic meanings. The desire for riches, or a beautiful wife or handsome husband, expressed in fairy tales, is normal and commonplace especially among people with none of it, though such desires may be hyperbolically expressed in the tales. Historically fairy tales are for both old and young.

A “self correcting tendency” has been observed amongst variants of the main fairy stories. The tales have been endlessly transforming themselves throughout history and yet endlessly stay the same. Bruno Bettelheim wrote:

As with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in their life

The self correcting tendency depends on strong stereotypes which correspond to deep human needs, seen by modern scholars as “social necessities”. Fairy tales are a social phenomenon, a shared experience, conditioned by the norms of the society in which they are told, and experience shows that human needs may persist remarkably from ancient times to the modern day. When fairy tales fail to fulfil their social purpose of meeting specific needs and urging socially acceptable solutions, society will be in mortal danger.

The Bible as Fairy Tales

The bible is full of marvels and puzzles—Jesus was faced constantly with conundrums set by his enemies. Folk and fairy tales are too, though the marvellous was symbolic—interpretation could vary, but was not mysterious.

A golden goose is an obvious marvel not in nature. Part of the charm of the goose is its farmyard commonness, and describing it as golden is expressing its value. It indicates the “riches” that may be found in simple life in the tasks done by good hearted people. The story tells how many people physically stick to it, as if glued? Why? They are supposedly respectable people. They get glued either to the golden goose or to those already caught, as a metaphor of their grasping or interfering natures. It ridicules them by making their universal greed and meddling a comic marvel—it even makes the sad princess laugh. That she does and is broken out of her sadness.

The naïve but honest hero, Dummling, holds, but is not stuck to, the goose. Dummling, the downtrodden but kindly boy, is the hero who discovers the golden goose, values it, but is not greedy and so is happy to make a present of it. That the hero wins the princess is poetic justice.

The tale is fantastic enough to make no promise that if you are kind and generous, as Dummling was to the unknown little old man at the beginning, you will inevitably be rewarded. But disinterested kindness and generosity can be rewarded, if only by internal satisfaction, and by social admiration, so communities, like individuals, should foster goodness and kindness. The story is socially uplifting.

Just as conscious mental skill came to human beings slowly, so it develops slowly in us as we grow up. Our thinking grows through metaphor. Our mother when we are infants cuddles us. We feel warm, and we feel her warmth making us warm. Later we can speak of warm friendships. The metaphor of warmth is applied to something abstract. beauty is similarly materialized as beautiful young women, and ugliness and horror as the beast, or the witch. The beast turns out to be kind, the witch may remain wicked and be dissolved, but the wicked queen can be a witch disguised as being beautiful. Our sense of beauty goes beyond pretty princesses, and ugliness beyond horrible looking people. Someone's behavior can be ugly though they are beautiful. We learn deeds are more important than good looks. We learn that appearances can be deceptive, and that we ought not to run to judgement. These fairy tales are exercises in imagination from which practical and moral lessons can be learnt or at least prepared for.

Stories based on communities which were mostly poor and whose tales both reflected and offered compensation for their hard lot, remind one of the bible, a set of texts similarly directed at poor communities—the New Testament. Yet, when Evald Tang Kristensen (b 1843) collected tales from poor country people in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth century, prosperous farmers and Christian fundamentalists particularly widely distrusted these folk and fairy tales. They were seen as teaching children things that were not true, unlike the bible! In The Parental Instructor of the time, we read a little parable for parents. The children, Charles and Mary Elliott, have asked their father to tell them a fairy tale. Their father, Mr Elliott, reproves them:

What! at your age would you wish me to relate stories which have not even the shadow of common sense in them? It would be ridiculous to see a great big boy of ten and a young lady of nine, listening, with open mouths, to the adventures of an ogre who ate little children, or the Little Gentleman with his Seven League boots. I could only pardon it in a child, who requires to be rocked asleep by his nurse.

The development of a child should guide the degree to which rational explanations of the characters and events are given. In the younger child, exercise of the imagination is most important, but eventually the child will naturally begin to enquire, and there is no need to preserve the fantasy rather than tell the truth. The child will overcome in later years a literal acceptance of fairy tales and while still enjoying the story. Of course, in the case of the bible, this is a stage discouraged by parents, who prefer to preserve the fantasy rather than the truth. So, a child will grow out of Santa Claus but may never grow out of Jesus Christ.

Mr Elliott had not noticed what was happening in his bible. Fairy tale creatures and magical happenings are common in the bible—angels, demons, dragons, and giants, talking snakes and donkeys, monsters like Leviathan, Behemoth, a succubus called Lilith, people who lived for centuries, a giant fish which swallows a man then sicks him up alive after 3 days, people who die and return to life, a flood that covered the earth to a depth of three miles, a wooden boat big enough to take breeding pairs (or more) of every animal, a man with immense strength as long as his hair was long, but not otherwise, a bush burning perpetually and speaking, a mysterious column of smoke and fire leading two million slaves across a desert, the water of the sea parting to let this two million people cross dry shod when a wizard raises his wand, a magic tower confusing tongues, a man walks on water and stills a storm, fire burns around people without harming them, a virgin giving birth, and more!

The realm of Faerie contains many things beside 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.

J R R Tolkien, 1964

Tolkien who was a Christian and a friend of C S Lewis, another famous Christian, knew of the closeness of “faerie” and the bible’s stories. The resurrection of the Christian hero from the dead is the central marvel of the New Testament, but almost all of the heroes of the ancient world descended into Hades, the kingdom of the dead. It meant they were, in fact, dead, and the king of Hades did not permit his subjects to return to life. They were able to do it because of some trick or bargain, usually with the assistance of a great God. Some gods or goddesses, did it annually, their myths being explanations of the seasons. Solar heroes, like Hercules did it, their adventures being an allegory of the sun's annual journey across the heavens. The sun god died and was restored to life at the midwinter solstice.

In fairy tales, heroes and heroines might be put into a deep and potentially eternal sleep. Just as it is in the bible, sleep is a euphemism for death. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are both myths about sleep as death. The beautiful maiden is the maiden earth, killed by a power—the power of winter, the dark sun—and awakened in the spring by the summer sun. They serve as stories of an adolescent girl wakening into womanhood.

Most fairy tales are not explicitly religious or specifically Christian, though collectors like the Grimm brothers might Christianize them to some extent. It is the recognition in them of the harshness of life and the need for patience and goodness that is explicit in the New Testament. The hardness of the times was understood to be signs that the wicked world was soon to end and the rich punished, though not those who had been righteous—the Poor!

Blessed are the poor in spirit! For theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Mt 5:3

We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

Rom 8:22

For we are saved by hope.

Rom 8:24

A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above his lord. It is enough for the disciple to become as his teacher, and the slave as his lord.

Mt 10:24-25

Give, and it shall be given unto you, good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over.

Lk 6:38

The worker is worthy of his food.

Mt 10:10

Fairness for Everyman and Everywoman

When did we see You sick, or in prison, and came to You? And answering, the King will say to them, Truly I say to you, In so far as you did it to one of these, the least of My brothers, you did it to Me.

Mt 25:39

In the Bible, the good but ordinary person shall receive. These are fairy tale themes too….

Innumerable fairy tales tell us this: the human qualities of the poor and lowly are their secret powers with which all obstacles are overcome.

Bengt Holbek, 1987

Miracles happen constantly in both Testaments. The Old Testament has fairy tales with similar messages. Such moralities are not peculiar to Christians or Jews. They are common to poor agrarian communities the world over.

The true hero in all the folk tales and fairy tales is not the younger son, or the younger daughter, or the stolen princess, or the ugly duckling, but the soul of man.

John Buchan, The Novel and the Fairy Tale

Fairy tales are not ostensibly Christian documents but many of their practical moralities coincide, and they might owe a great deal to their being spread by the heretical Cathars, whose Christianity was much closer to that of Christ than that of Paul. The fairy tale hero and heroine, like the hero of the Christian gospels, represent everyman and everywoman. God resides in them. Kindness to the poor, the old, the ugly, and even to animals, in fairy tales, is a strength. The tale often tells of the maturing of the protagonist, with whom both teller and audience tend to identify. It turns on some marvellous incident, or discovery, or gift, or information, or the convention that the protagonist will transgress some interdiction, and by so doing find success. Interdictions, like a “lack”, are part of life for the poor, and fairy tales offer conveniently fictional models of how to deal with them. The interdiction is infringed, leading—perhaps through suffering—to greater good. The lack may be one of status, like that of Cinderella.

The success of tricksters is more common in fairy tales, like Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk, but there are also successful tricksters like Jacob, David and Samson in the Old Testament, and Satan is, of course, the original trickster, according to religious belief in him.

A Rabbi Defends Fairy Tales

Neil Jenkins tells us Rabbi Nahman ben Simha (1772-1810) of Bratslav believed that, in the original creation, all the elements of the true and eternal story of redemption were scattered through the world, to be pieced together in the form of fairy tales:

In the tales which other people tell, there are many secrets and lofty matters, but the tales have been ruined in that they are lacking much. They are confused and not told in the proper sequence: what belongs at the beginning they tell at the end and vice versa.

D G Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, 1995

So, for Rabbi Nahman, fairy tales were telling the same story as the bible, but in a confused way. It was also a truth that most rabbis believed, that the bible itself was flawed despite its holy origin because it was in a flawed world in which nothing could remain perfect. As the Jewish scriptures themselves admit that the “Slightly Mad” Antiochus tried to destroy the scriptures in the second century BC, it ought to be plain even to fundamentalists that they cannot be perfect. Faults in both the scriptures and the scattered truths R Nahman saw in folk tales means that no parts of either can be taken as certainly right, so the overall moral impression they all convey has to be regarded as their true message.

The immediate meaning of biblical stories is clear, but they are rich in allegorical meanings for those who wish to find them. What matters in fairy stories are what matter to the community, and can be expressed in stereotyped characters and narrative patterns, which do not depend on material probability or on a plot with realistic cause and effect. The plot has its own internal logic which must satisfy the common desire for a marvel and a satisfactory outcome. That is like the bible stories, but religious stories are considered too sacred to be treated as fairy tales, even though they share so much in common with them.

Further Reading

• Read more about fairy beliefs.

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