Perhaps I perused fairytale books too often as a child, for my imagination is overrun with knights and princess, wood witches and wizards and fairies and other imaginings and are vividly etched in my dreams. One such tale that remains one of my favorites is Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm.
Read: Sleeping Beauty
The Moral of The Story
Many a girl has waited long
For a husband brave or strong;
But I'm sure I never met
Any sort of woman yet
Who could wait a hundred years,
Free from fretting, free from fears.
For a husband brave or strong;
But I'm sure I never met
Any sort of woman yet
Who could wait a hundred years,
Free from fretting, free from fears.
Now, our story seems to show
That a century or so,
Late or early, matters not;
True love comes by fairy-lot.
Some old folk will even say
It grows better by delay.
That a century or so,
Late or early, matters not;
True love comes by fairy-lot.
Some old folk will even say
It grows better by delay.
Yet this good advice, I fear,
Helps us neither there nor here.
Though philosophers may prate
How much wiser 'tis to wait,
Maids will be a sighing still --
Young blood must when young blood will!
Helps us neither there nor here.
Though philosophers may prate
How much wiser 'tis to wait,
Maids will be a sighing still --
Young blood must when young blood will!
~*~
Armando Maggi, a University of Chicago professor in Romance languages and literatures, believes fairy tales have lost their magic. "The glass slippers and poison apples, the evil stepmothers and fairy godmothers and princes charming—and the kisses that lead to happily ever after—these things no longer exert much imaginative or intellectual force, he says."
The audience for which fairytales should have the greatest impact, has changed. The tales no longer resonate with the public, which is sad because Maggi believes “We can understand reality only through a mythic lens.” Fairy tales were once that lens. It was through fairy tales that we learned about the world, or at the very least, morality. "Now the view is narrower."
Yet in spite of this perceived movement away from fairytales, which have been reimagined numerous times, we are still drawn to them. The tales are often timeless, as is the moral of the story. "We cling to them, like the queen returning every morning to her mirror, because we have nothing else to take their place. . . .We need a new mythology.”
“We cannot live without mythology,” Maggi says. “It’s the way we reason, the way we survive, the way we make sense of our world. It’s just that the stories we’ve been using—mythic stories, fairy tales, legends—they’re not working anymore. We need something new. What we long for is a remythologization of reality.”
That’s the argument Maggi makes in his book, Preserving the Spell published by the
University of Chicago Press. "Seven years ago, Maggi taught a seminar called Renaissance and Baroque Fairy Tales and Their Modern Rewritings." Thus he began questioning this idea, the remythologization and the 1634 A.D. fairytales appearing in The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones, by Italian poet Giambattista Basile caught his attention. While not intended for children, they are fairytales, nonetheless.
"Over the next two centuries, the brothers Grimm—and before them, French fairy-tale collector Charles Perrault—rewrote Basile’s stories, adapting them to their own cultural moments." Once the moral center was flushed out of many of today's most popular tales, they were converted into tales acceptable for children.
‘We must be able to dream’
Maggi argues that the by reconstructing the origins of contemporary tales we might be able to construct new narratives that will allow one to dream. His research into fairytales has given him the ability to speak on the topic. He has said the most common question he is asked, “So, where are the new stories?” Is a question he can’t yet answer. “What I say is, ‘It has to be a cultural change. It can’t be one person who saves fairy tales.’”
Perhaps a more simplistic route introduced by Johnathan Young is more viably acceptable? In his article, Once Upon A Time, he wrote,
The work of creativity is to "follow the golden thread." Something catches your attention, a feeling, an image, an idea, the events of a moment. The challenge is to pay attention to that subtle urge and follow it gently. We must roll out the golden thread with care or it will break. Opening ourselves to greater significance in familiar stories requires a certain tenderness of spirit. The notions will be fragile at first. We must hold them gently for a time until they deliver their message to us. The effects of what we learn might well last for a lifetime.
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