On Fairy Tales
The marvel of fairy tales is a divine revelation; they are the popular, and therefore the most sincere form of epic and mythology, both of which lead to transcendent realities. The myths express the essence of a people and continue to live on in the tales; they are therefore, at heart, of a religious nature.
- Wilhelm Grimm
The topic of fairy tales, or folklore in general, is by and large not very well understood these days. Most think of fairy tales as fantastic and often educational children’s stories, and unsurprisingly so, since it is usually in this context that we first come into contact with this medium. Many of us might remember fondly being read fairy tales as a kid or watching one of those colorful Disney-movies with their uplifting messages about the power of friendship and the eternal struggle of good against evil.
However, this conception of the fairy tale is rather new and dates back no further than the late 17th century. It is in fact deeply connected with the transposition of the fairy tale from an oral tradition to written form as well as it’s displacement from a rural environment to an urban and “civilized” culture. The earliest collectors of fairy tales like Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy and even the brothers Grimm didn’t explicitly address a children’s, but a general audience. As is known, the motive behind committing them to written form was often romantic and nationalistic in nature. Fairy tales were seen as an authentic expression of a people’s national genius, reaching back even to the mythological beginnings that had long since been forgotten. The brothers Grimm for example rejected many a tale because they had already found a similar version in Perrault, thus concluding that the tale must be “french” and not germanic in origin.
Yet, with the emergence of, for the first time, a “children’s audience” (as well as the emergence of that “high literature” for adult audiences which succeeded romanticism) the simplistic narratives of fairy tales (owing to their oral and mnemonic roots) seemed as if made for kids and other unsophisticated rabble. Hence their focus shifted more and more to educative and pedagogical purposes. We all know of course about the famous “moral of the story”, which seems to us so essential to the very nature of the fairy tale; yet it bears remembering that many, if not most of these “morals” were indeed later additions, dating to the time of their fixation into writing.1 Fairy tales become “contes moralisitrices” in the spirit of La Fontaine’s fables, which were composed during the same time period; the witticisms of enlightenment culture. Certainly, every fairy tale contains, at its core, a teaching; however their content is not bourgeois morality, “their content is”, as Coomaraswamy remarks, “metaphysical”2.
Here we are getting to the heart of the matter. For fairy tales are neither “moral lessons” nor a sort of product of a people’s collective imagination, but “relics of an ancient wisdom, as valid now as it ever was”3. They may be popular in form, yet they are not popular in origin, for their content is of an altogether timeless order. The folk acts as a kind of Aristotelian matter which receives the idea, shapes and manifests it.
The people preserve, without understanding them, the relics of former traditions which go back sometimes to a past too remote to be dated, so that it has to be relegated to the obscure domain of the “prehistoric”; they thereby fulfill the function of a more or less subconscious collective memory, the contents of which have clearly come from elsewhere4
As such fairy tales also transcend national limits. For many of our popular tales we have predecessors reaching back to ancient persia and greece, and these stories go back to times more ancient still and cultures long forgotten, having been told and retold, under on form or the other, since time immemorial. We should thus not be surprised that the archetypical motives of fairy tales - the escape from the dark forest, the overcoming of monsterous adversaries, death and ressurection, hidden treasures of gold, the attainment of beauty and undying love - resonate deeply with the mythological and religious literature of all peoples. Scholars have pointed out that Sleeping Beauty presents but a thinly veiled retelling of the ancient legend of Brünhilde, alchemist discovered in the story Snow White an allegorical manual for the philosopher’s stone and is not Dante, lost in “una selva oscura”, drawing on the same symbolism as Hänsel & Gretel, The Little Thumbling and many others?
When atheists dismiss religious texts as “mere fairy tales”, they might indeed be saying something more profound than they themselves could imagine. Consider only the tale of Rapunzel; is not this story of a primal love lost, of wandering the earth in exile and blindless and the eventual reunion of bride and bridegroom of a deeply biblical nature? What is more, does not the loss of traditional tales go hand in hand with the loss of religion, of meaning, the transcendant? And is not the subversion of these tales by the modern media apparatus and their replacement with satanic counter-mythologies ultimately an attack on truth itself, a rebellion against being, as it were?
The modern world cannot comprehend or even tolerate fairy tales, for they are relics of a culture where everything pointed to the divine. All fairy tales are, in essence, stories of realization, stories of the Self and the psychomachy of the soul and the spirit; they are initiations, presenting themselves under the innocent guise of a riddle, that, not unlike a kōan, works on the mind subconsciously, untangeling our mental “knots”. Yet, regardless of the many paths and approaches that the tale offers to its reader, they remain incommensurable, resisting every definitive solution, for their truth is not exhaustible on the horizontal plane alone.
We would do well to immerse ourselves again in these stories and to relearn their ancient language; for they are good and true, and many of the stories that surround us today are authored by the father of lies, aiming not to uplift and unite but to confuse and scatter. Let us thus not be enslaved by falsehood but set free by timeless truth and reenchant the world one step at a time.
Many tales were also “sanitized” and purged of their sexual contents, while the violence was often left in or even exaggerated in the spirit of old fashioned pedagogy (The gory depictions of Stuwwelpeter et al. I saw in my children’s books did certainly succeed in instilling the fear of God into me - or at least the fear of sucking on my thumb).
Coomaraswamy, Primitive Mentality.
Coomaraswamy, ibid.
Guénon, The Holy Grail.