Fairy Tales

For some, the term fairy tales conjures up visions of wand-waving ballerinas; for others, the term is simply a catch-all for any fanciful story that couldn’t be true. But though traditional fairy tales, with their “once upon a time,” edge us into “another world” of wonder and magical possibility, that world can open us to truths we have forgotten—or refuse to see in our own world. “These tales,” writes G. K. Chesterton, “say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water” (Orthodoxy, p. 257).

Since the umbrella of “fairy tale” spreads so widely that at times it covers everything from ancient myths and legends to Saturday-morning cartoons, we do well to get a good grip on its handle—the traditional fairy tales. These stories, such as “Cinderella,” “The Fisherman and His Wife,” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Frog Prince,” not only contain the basic patterns—story types and motifs—of literature but also help us understand the ability of literature to move us in profound ways. As Christopher Morley has often been quoted as saying, “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper, ink, and glue—you sell him a whole new life.”

The power of great literature, of stories, to change our lives—to shake heart, mind and soul to the core of our being—is itself embedded in traditional fairy tales.

Characteristics of Fairy Tales

“Once upon a Time”—Agelessness. These stories are sometimes called “nursery tales,” implying, to a twentieth-century audience, that they are best read to toddlers. While many of the stories can, at least in some form, be appreciated by very young children, the prime age for most fairy stories is anytime from ages six to seven and up. The bare bones of plot are there for all, including the very young, but these bones are a sturdy skeleton for the whole human story. As we grow older, we flesh them out more and more with our own experience, and we clothe that flesh with interpretations and understandings that we weave with the warp and woof of our own needs and longings.

These bones of human story in fairy tales have the ability to hold the flesh of our own stories—no matter how old we are or who we are—because they have weathered the storms of historical and cultural change. The story of Cinderella, for example, comes in over fifteen hundred versions from sources as spread out over time and place as Egypt’s first-century b.c. “Rhodopis,” China’s ninth-century a.d. “Yeh-shen,” North America’s Algonquin Indian “Rough-Face Girl” and Germany’s “Aschenputtel.” And the German and English names reflect the tales’ inherent universality of both character and theme, for Cinderella and Aschenputtel describe a very lowly state—a “girl in ashes”—rather than a distinguishing name.

Through all the variations of detail and development in these versions of “Cinderella,” the essential story of a young maid’s rise from ashes to royalty has remained remarkably intact—complete, in most cases, with a focus on footwear. As G. K. Chesterton points out: “The lesson of ‘Cinderella’ . . . is the same as that of the Magnificat—exaltavit humiles [‘he exalted the humble’]” (p. 253). The great truth underlying the story of Cinderella can be a door to the scriptural truth of Mary (herself another such humble handmaid) and of her song (the Magnificat), and of the Gospels—the good news: our God “has lifted up the humble” (Luke 1:52).

Fairy tales have a habit of making heroes of the humble: the rejected daughter becomes a princess, the youngest son becomes a king, the ugly duckling becomes a graceful and beautiful swan. George MacDonald’s answer to the query (which most of us have) “But, Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?” was to assure his reader that “every little girl is a princess, and there would be no need to say anything about it, except that she is always in danger of forgetting her rank, and behaving as if she had grown out of the mud” (p. 9).

A woman brought up with a Chinese heritage once read the German version of “Cinderella” and ended it crying for joy: “That is my story,” she wrote. “I am the third unloved child who had to do all the menial chores—this story gives me hope!” These old stories can cut through our despair and disillusionment to the heart and bone of human life, enabling us to remember that we can be, each one of us, a son or daughter of the King and that through his life-giving love we look forward to the great end-celebration of hope we call heaven.

“Don’t Stray off the Path”—Moral Truthfulness. “The Ethics of Elfland” is the title G. K. Chesterton gave to his fine and deeply Christian treatise on fairy tales. There he claims that a great principle of the fairy philosophy is “the Doctrine of conditional Joy” (p. 258). In these old stories, he goes on to point out, “happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do” (p. 260).

The condition is usually simple obedience to a seemingly arbitrary command. As Robert Farrar Capon puts it in The Third Peacock, his book on the problem of evil, “After entering the garden go straight to the tree, pick the apple and get out. Do not, under any circumstances, engage in conversation with the third peacock on the left” (p. 27). We all remember the childhood lessons of Little Red Riding Hood: “Stay on the path; don’t talk to strangers.”

Nevertheless, the heroes and heroines of these tales are reassuringly like us—they fail to meet the condition, sometimes over and over again. As Chesterton reminds us, in the biblical story “an apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone” (p. 259). And so these tales teach us the lessons of character we need to pick up and keep on going. They teach us persistence and faithfulness, the ability to keep trying against all odds and in spite of repeated failure; they teach us kindness and compassion, the ability to forgive others’ failings and weaknesses; and, above all, they teach us love, the willingness to sacrifice our own happiness for someone else’s. In fairy tales, the burden of these lessons for living is lightened by the wings of story.

“And They Lived Happily Ever After”—Good (and Bad) Endings. The greatest wonder of the fairy-tale world is the “happily ever after.” Yet the hope that is offered to Cinderella, and vicariously to us, is more and more rejected as wishful thinking. But to endure the ups and downs of life we need hope, and these tales offer hope of a perfect end. These good endings are not cheap grace: as Chesterton makes clear, “in the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition” (p. 259). The scales of justice tip on this “if” from which hangs the balance between gloom and glory, between death and life, between dancing to death in red-hot shoes and a wedding celebration of great splendor. The good endings are glorious intimations of heaven; the bad endings are sometimes so harsh and hellish that fairy tales are accused of both black-and-white rigidity and violence that is too much for children.

Yet we need these tales to clear our clouded consciences and sharpen our moral sensitivity. “For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy” (Tolkien, p. 66). Mary’s Magnificat promises that God lifts up the humble, but, as both the Magnificat and the Cinderella story remind—warn—each of us, he also brings down “those who are proud in their inmost thoughts” (Luke 1:51). The good ending of a fairy tale is, like the good ending of all time, always bought with a price. In his great essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien affirms that familiar refrain “and they lived happily ever after”: “The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending.’ The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed” (Tolkien, p. 89).

Some Suggestions for Reading Fairy Tales

1. We should begin reading these stories in the nursery, in other words, with young children, but we must not leave them there. All of us need these stories. Perhaps, however, the prime time for them is ages seven to ten. During these years the doors of the soul can start to swing shut on the possibility of that larger world—the heart of Faerie—that includes not just the realities we see and touch every day but the spiritual realities of God and of that “Perilous Realm” of the human soul where choices lead to heaven or hell. Fairy tales can keep the door open to belief in “another world” that includes and is much larger than the visible world.

2. We should remember that fairy tales were originally told, not read, and that much of their value comes from the embellishments we add with our mind’s eye. Illustrated or extensively rewritten versions often fill blanks best left open to the imagination and perceptions of the listener.

3. We must try to resist finding allegories and lessons in these old stories. And we must certainly resist pointing such possibilities out to children. They will grow into a continually richer and fuller understanding on their own—as they need to. George MacDonald wisely observes that children find out what they are capable of finding, and more would be too much. Sometimes our interpretations can block out what children (or adults!) need to discover on their own. We must, however, listen to their interpretations. Through the connections they discover and tell us about, we may learn much about the concerns of our children (or of our friends).

4. We need to avoid worrying that our children will confuse the “other world” of Faerie with the world of the biblical story—or with the everyday world. Recently this fear has escalated into a panicky association of these old tales with the New Age movement, leading to a rejection of not only fairy tales but also, in extreme cases, such imaginative literature as the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis. As Lewis points out in his fine essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: “About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale” (p. 28). We are in such a period now: fairy tales are accused of being nightmarishly scary, of leading to fantasizing and unreal expectations and longings, or, increasingly, of being remnants of ancient satanic rituals. The truth here is that fairy tales, like all stories, rise from longings to know who we are and what we are about—and these are spiritual questions. Any good literature is dangerous and often frightening, because it forces us to deal with these questions—and thus more deeply with spiritual issues.

But by far the greater danger is a wooden flatness of our world, whether spiritual or physical, that can come if we “protect” ourselves—or our children—from either the heights of the glory or the depths of the gloom to be found in imaginative literature. Lewis defended the true world of the fairy tale: “I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. . . . I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like school stories” (p. 28). The superficial concerns of such school stories and of much of our lives often cover up truths of self-giving love and ultimate justice which form the bedrock of the fairy-tale world. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis, the great Aslan, who is there both lamb and lion, both love and justice, says to Edmund and Lucy, “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there” (p. 247). The “other world” of fairy tales tells us truths that help us recognize patterns of spiritual truth—and even God himself—better in our own everyday world.

5. We must immerse our children and ourselves in the “other worlds” of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and George MacDonald’s “Princess” books. We should read them out loud and read them often. Their worlds were created by a wide reading of both fairy tales and the biblical story.

But we need to keep coming back, all our lives, to the old, traditional tales. Fairy tales that insist on wonder and magic can enrich our reading of the biblical story—for deep through that ocean of fairy tale runs the warm, rich current of God’s full and final truth.

» See also: Imagination

» See also: Reading

» See also: Storytelling

References and Resources

R. F. Capon, The Third Peacock (New York: Image Books, 1972); G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” in Orthodoxy, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986); M. T. Donze, Touching a Child’s Heart (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria, 1985); R. Haughton, Tales from Eternity: The World of Fairy Tales (New York: Seabury, 1973); C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Of Other Worlds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966); C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: Harper, 1980); G. MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (New York: Books of Wonder, 1986); I. Opie and P. Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

Where to Begin

P. C. Asbjornsen, I. D’Aulaire and E. P. D’Aulaire, eds., East of the Sun and West of the Moon (New York: Viking, 1969); W. Gag, ed., Tales from Grimm (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981); W. Gag, ed., More Tales from Grimm (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981); V. Hamilton, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (New York: Knopf, 1985); A. Lang, The Blue [Gray, Purple, Red, Pink, Brown, etc.] Fairy Book (New York: Airmont, 1969); M. Twain, The Arabian Nights (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1981).

—Mary Ruth Wilkinson