Witches, Elves, Wolves and More
I can’t recall how old I was when I first heard – or read – the story of Hansel and Gretel. Do you remember the basics of the story? A poor couple, close to starving, can’t find enough food for their children. The cruel wife persuades her husband to take the children into the woods, and lose them there, since that would be ‘kinder’ than actually killing them. After some adventures the children find a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest. They were starving, and, having eaten some of the gingerbread, they end up imprisoned by the witch who lived there. She intends to fatten them up, then cook and eat them, but they manage to escape, and eventually return home to their father, along with jewels they’d found in the gingerbread house, where they learn their mother has died. They and their father lived happily ever after (as people almost always do at the end of fairy tales).
Why is it young children can read stories like these, and yet still happily go off to bed at the end of the day? As was the case with others I heard, the fact of the matter is that I enjoyed that story, and, in particular, I was fascinated by the idea of a gingerbread house – a house made of eatable walls! It was a fairy tale. It had scary parts, but I knew it wasn’t real. It was vivid and exciting. Years later, what did I remember? The fact it was an edible gingerbread house. Did I find the mother terrifying? Her death sad? The witch overwhelmingly cruel? Maybe. The story was thrilling, certainly, but I didn’t suffer any sleepless nights.
Some such stories are sad, of course. Another that did stick in my young mind was the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the Little Match Girl. I am sure you know it. One New Year’s Eve, a poor little girl wandered barefoot through the streets in the bitter cold, carrying a box of matches to sell. No one bought any. She couldn’t go home empty-handed and lit a match because her hands were almost frozen, and when it lit, she imagined she was sitting in front of a big stove. She continues to light matches until she sees a shooting star, and remembered her grandmother had told her that when a star falls, a soul is going up to god. She strikes the whole bundle of remaining matches and is taken into her grandmother’s arms and together they soared in a halo of light and joy far above the earth to be with god. Her body is found the next morning, New Year’s Day, frozen to death with a fistful of burnt-out matches in her hand. The story ends with our being told that people said she must have tried to warm herself, but not one of them knew the wonderful visions she had. Sad, but beautiful.
As Haley Stewart observes (in The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales, Plough 17 June 2024), “Classic fairy tales aren’t for the faint of heart.” However, that is an adult perspective. Fairy tales are magical adventures for children, and they aren’t for reflection and analysis, they are about action, and I see them as demanding their young readers’ attention with their relentless focus on what happens next. They feed the imagination and they help explore the world, but in a way that is safe: they do so by taking place in magical environments, with heroes and heroines, overcoming dangers and resolving fears and uncertainties. Dreadful things can happen. People can die. But, at the end of the story, everything is set back to right again. Even the little match girl is ‘saved’.
As children grow older, fairy stories lose their power. Slowly, the real world takes over, and in many ways it is far more frightening than the fairy world. I enjoyed fairy stories, and I can remember I enjoyed the thrills and feelings of fear combined with excitement. That was quite different from the situations a few years later when I confronted the ‘facts of the real world’, especially the fact of my own mortality. Now, that was scary, and I was terrified about the inevitability of my own death for a couple of years. Fairy stories had sheltered me by making so much around me clothed in fantasy. However, they had helped me, too.
How do those childhood stories help us? Under the guise of everything taking place in another world, they allow us to confront disturbing possibilities. Sisters can be nasty and spiteful; brothers can be greedy and dishonest. Even worse, parents can be evil, aided and abetted by a mysterious world of witches, sorcerers and other horrible creatures like wraiths and monsters. Such possibilities are frighteningly entertaining, but they are also subtly preparatory. As we get older, we will have to confront a reality in which real siblings, parents, neighbours and teachers can all turn out to be as complex as those outlandish creatures in fairyland. It is almost as if we are being softened up: mum and dad seem nice right now, but things might change; perhaps your brother is going to turn out to be like Rumpelstiltskin. If things change, the results might be rather horrible …
Let me start again. If I was writing this back in the middle of the last century, I would be arguing that childhood fairy stories are helpful in various ways. I suspect that was true for children a couple of generations ago. However, today we seem to have ‘Disneyfied’ the stories, taking out all the gruesome stuff so as not to frighten the young. In Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid some crucial elements of Hans Christian Andersen’s story are omitted: in the written tale Prince Eric marries someone else, and Ariel is confronted with the choice of killing Eric on his wedding night, or she’ll die the next morning. Ariel, that’s the nice bubbly girl with curly red hair, and she is contemplating murder! Haley Stewart reminds us that “In an effort to make another story more palatable, Disney’s Cinderella does not include the details of Cinderella’s stepsisters “chopping off their heels and toes to fit their bloody, mutilated feet into the glass slipper in greedy pursuit of the throne or getting their eyes pecked out by birds in a final stroke of justice”, as the Grimms’ version describes. A softer update, but at the cost of whitewashing the reality of hatred, greed, and vicious behaviour.
As I mentioned, Haley Stewart observed that “Classic fairy tales aren’t for the faint of heart.” This might be why we see the consequences of this in the way violent, misogynistic and evil behaviour is written out of classic fairy tales, or at the very least ameliorated. The wolf that ate Red Riding Hood’s grandmother now locks the old lady up in a cupboard. Somewhere along the line, adults have decided that these stories are too frightening, too disturbing, for young and impressionable minds, even if, most of the time, good triumphs and things work out at the end. In many fairy tales there are events which include a few ‘incidental’ deaths and nasty actions along the way, and sensitive little children should be spared such things.
There are two issues that kind parents are missing in this mollycoddling approach. First, by telling stories taking place in a fantasyland, they allow some key issues to be taken seriously while keeping them sufficiently unreal to be contemplated. The world does contain evil as well as goodness, and many fairy stories take this seriously. They are truthful. There are occasions and situations when we have to wrestle with darkness, but doing so is the path to overcoming evil and ending in triumph. These are morality tales, explaining that there are evil people, that they do terrible things, and that they can be repulsed and beaten. I think this is a positive and important role, and far better than some of the depressing literature that some teenagers read today, novels where continuing failure and despair are emphasised.
There is a paradox inside this, too. In the same elementary schools where children now hear these safe and innocuous stories, they also have to practice safety drills, and learn the rules of safe behaviour. Parents increasingly take on the responsibility to drive their children to school, to save them from the possibility of being attacked, stolen, abused, or killed. Denied tales of disaster overcome through adventures in another realm, now young people are left to fear terrible things that could happen in their present world, where the emphasis is on the evils and threats everywhere they go . Forget about fairy stories: in today’s world, the pressing dangers are just around the corner, just outside the school gates.
I don’t want to be seen as arguing that parents shouldn’t protect their children from the dark and unpleasant elements of life. However, as it seems we prefer to tell fairy tales that are about happy events, positive magic, and harmless pursuits, I wonder why have we decided to protect children to the extent they don’t hear what Stewart describes as the “stories that help them process dark things? … Is this sheltering from the classic grit of fairy tales benefiting them, or are these just the sort of stories they need to be able to endure the violence that hangs like a shadow over our world?” Do we believe if we shelter them from stories about evil grandmothers and violent spectres, children will believe ‘nothing will happen to me’?
It’s an illusory belief. Children know that sometimes mothers die, and quickly learn from each other at kindergarten and school more than we might realise about the facts of death, loss, and danger – children love sharing stories about frightening things, however much protection parents might believe they are offering. The real question is how we allow them to wrestle with these fears. British writer G. K. Chesterton famously wrote, “The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a Saint George to kill the dragon.” If we protect a child by suggesting there are no dragons, or, more to the point, that the dragons of life can’t hurt him, we not only fail to tell the truth, but we also fail to show him that dragons do not have the last word. And the child longs to be equipped to face the monsters he fears, whether dragons or death.
There is a second perspective on fairy tales which is less often examined, but equally important as issues to do with confronting good and evil. This is the role of these stories when they are seen as myths, parts of the culture that an anthropologist like Claude Levi-Strauss would examine. For Levi-Strauss myths are a “language, functioning on an especially high level”, where the story poses and addresses various oppositions and contradictions, symbolic representations representing something that is essential to understanding what it is to be human. In this perspective, fairy tales, like myths, are stories that give structure to patterns of action practiced in the society that tells them, and the categories we use to sort out meaning. The stories become an informal means of education for the child, interpreting and explaining key element of the practices they describe. The stories also become part of role-playing games that allow children to deal with the conflicts and tensions inherent in their society, as well as giving them an outlet for dealing with their negative and cruel feelings, and with unconscious problems and conflicts they are confronting at the time.
It is easy to see how this can be applied to the story of Hansel and Gretel. The various dimensions in this story, the underlying structure if you like, has to do with the relationship between a child and parent, a father and a wife, and a parent and a grandparent (in this case who symbolised by the witch in the gingerbread house). Among the issues to be addressed are the conflicting realities that a parent can be loving, and a parent can be cruel: it’s a neat resolution to get rid of the cruel parent, the mother in the story, and be saved by the kind parent, the father (an inversion on the events that take place in many such stories). The second dimension the story addresses is child to grandparent: the grandparent as loving and indulgent, and the grandparent as strict and mean.
A fairy tale like Hansel and Gretel acknowledges that parents do not always love and care for their children as they ought, that loved ones die and leave us alone and grieving, that evil is real and often powerful, and that violence and sin are present in our world. All these truths make grownups uncomfortable; as a result it seems contemporary parents are eager to smooth over a child’s fears with comforting falsehoods. To combat both the anxiety that comes to children robbed of the space to confront evil and the despair that holds that the last chapter of humanity’s tale is final defeat, I suggest we have to offer ‘truer’ fairy stories.
Early in life, I believe children should have the opportunity to hear tales that don’t gloss over the dark and ugly parts of the world. As Stewart puts it: “Children are wise; they reject the false advertising of cheap positive thinking for the real prize of hard-won hope. For a message of hope to be received, it must be hope that shines in darkness, hope that breaks the witch’s spell.” “It is the mark of a good fairy-story,” J. R. R. Tolkien writes in his essay On Fairy-Stories, “that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.” But to tell such stories, we have to believe they are true. If we grown-ups don’t believe there is, as Tolkien calls it, “joy beyond the walls of the world,” then our children will not believe us when we share fairy tales that end with hope. He pints out that if we offer narratives of a world without hope, our stories are no better than the sanitized tales that refuse to acknowledge mortality and evil. They are simply a different way of failing to tell the whole truth.
But ‘happily ever afterwards’ may be difficult to envision unless we offer a sustaining perspective. At the end of Andersen’s story, the little mermaid loses her life and her body disintegrates into sea foam on the surface of the waves. But her sacrifice for her beloved prince is rewarded by the chance to gain a human soul and therefore to experience eternal life. This ending is positive in that it is accompanied by a belief in an afterlife, offering hope for the victim of murder. Ah, but that was when we believed in such a thing as life in the hereafter. Now we seem to have lost this eternal perspective which comforted us, offering a reassuring promise that takes us beyond the darkness and dreadful events in this world.
“Deprive children of stories,” warns philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, “and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.” Like Hansel and Gretel leaving their little white pebbles along their path into the dark forest, he suggests the next generation needs us to provide them with touchstones that can keep them from getting lost on their journey and help them find their way back home. He suggests these pathfinders are the stories they’re told, stories that light up the dark, that reveal the existence of dragons hiding in the caves of life, and remind us that Saint George will be ultimately triumphant, even when it seems all hope is lost.
Indeed, some have argued it is not merely individual development that is served by fairytales but the forces at the heart of human culture. Hans Blumenberg, a philosopher of mythology, suggests that folktales help societies cope with commonly experienced moral and physical threats to happiness, and that what he calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ is responsible for the persistence of storytelling in society. He sees myth in general and fairy tales in particular as means of rationalizing anxiety into fear of specific, identified actors with powers whom we can address, and because of that, deal with. As our reality in modern times poses fundamental threats to our capacity for survival, we will continue to need to update , revise and retell the stories that define our worth as humans. Fairy tales matter. We need them today.
