The Grimm Reader

by Maria Tatar

  From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. P. 414.

  RICHARD WRIGHT

  “ ‘Once upon a time there was an old, old man named Bluebeard,’ she began in a low whisper.

  She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me. She told how Bluebeard had duped and married his seven wives, how he had loved and slain them, how he had hanged them up by their hair in a dark closet. The tale made the world around me be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. Enchanted and enthralled, I stopped her constantly to ask for details. My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me.”

  Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. P. 34.

  WILLIAM J. BROOKE

  “The telling of a tale links you with everyone who has told it before. There are no new tales, only new tellers, telling in their own way, and if you listen closely you can hear the voice of everyone who ever told the tale.”

  A Telling of the Tales: Five Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. P. ix.

  PETER STRAUB

  “ ‘[In fairy tales] the natural world of common sense and social differentiation is set aside, and magic takes charge of things. It speaks in poetry. It alters the world. Remember that first sentence? There was once . . . It doesn’t matter what comes after that; when you hear words like that, you know the ordinary rules don’t work—animals will talk, people will turn into animals, the world will turn topsy-turvy. But at the end . . .’ He raised his hand.

  ‘It turns back again,’ Del said. ‘Magically right.’ ”

  Shadowland. New York: Penguin Putnam, Berkley Publishing, 1980. P. 63.

  SYLVIA PLATH

  “After being conditioned as a child to the lovely never-never land of magic, of fairy queens and virginal maidens, of little princes and their rosebushes, of poignant bears and Eeyore-ish donkeys, of life personalized, as the pagans loved it, of the magic wand, and the faultless illustrations—the beautiful dark-haired child (who was you) winging through the midnight sky on a star-path in her mother’s box of reels . . . all this I knew, and felt, and believed. All this was my life when I was young. . . . Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life? To learn snide and smutty meanings of words you once loved, like ‘fairy.’ ”

  The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. P. 35.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  “‘And they lived happily ever after,’ says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind ‘acts dumb’ toward the myth; in the figure of the younger brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man. The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits. (This is how the fairy tale polarizes Mut, courage, dividing it dialectically into Untermut, that is, cunning, and Übermut, high spirits.) The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.”

  “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Pp. 83–109.

  MARGARET DRABBLE

  “When she was little, Frieda had loved the goblins, the princesses, the old men of the sea, the water maidens, the raven brothers, the haunted woods. Yet the stories were often absurd, often inconsequential. Frieda’s literal, logical battleaxe of a mind had often been bemused and entangled by these tales. She had tried to chop her way through the briars. She did not like nonsense. There was a mystery there, forever beyond her grasp.”

  The Witch of Exmoor. New York: Viking, 1996. Pp. 112–13.

  NAOMI LEWIS

  “Fairy tales: yes or no? What do you gain by meeting them as a child? Better to start by saying how much is lost if you fail to meet them then, or do so only through cartoon films of the Disney type, or videos. The words are part of the whole. In the landscape of the mind, whatever is planted early lasts and grows through time. Reality may be a featureless-suburban street; but the mind of the fairy-tale reader holds mountains, oceans, distances, a forest that is haven, shelter, and mystery, some day to be explored, with a pathway that leads to the very edge of the world.”

  “Introduction.” In Classic Fairy Tales to Read Out Loud. New York: Kingfisher, 1996. Pp. 5–8.

  THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS

  “Fairy-tales are as normal as milk or bread. Civilisation changes; but fairy-tales never change . . . its spirit is the spirit of folk-lore; and folk-lore is, in strict translation, the German for common-sense. Fiction and modern fantasy . . . can be described in one phrase. Their philosophy means ordinary things as seen by extraordinary people. The fairy-tale means extraordinary things seen by ordinary people. The fairy-tale is full of mental health. . . . Fairy-tales are the oldest and gravest and most universal kind of human literature . . . the fairy-tales are much more of a picture of the permanent life of the great mass of mankind than most realistic fiction.”

  “Education by Fairy Tales.” In The Illustrated London News, 2 December 1905.

  GEORGE MACDONALD

  “ ‘You write as if a fairytale were a thing of importance: must it have a meaning?’

  It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the fairytale would give no delight. Everyone, however, who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will read one meaning in it, another will read another.”

  “The Fantastic Imagination.” In The Complete Fairy Tales, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher. New York, Penguin, 1999. Pp. 5–10.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  “How am I to sing your praise,

  Happy chimney-corner days,

  Sitting safe in nursery nooks,

  Reading picture story-books?”

  A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885.

  ANDREW LANG

  “I trust that one may have studied fairy tales both scientifically and in a literary way, without losing the heart of childhood, as far as those best of child
ish things are concerned. May one be forgiven the egotism of confessing, that in the reading and arranging of these old wives’ fables, one has felt perhaps as much pleasure as the child who reads them, or hears them, for the first time? Children, as we know, like to hear a tale often, and always insist that it shall be told in the same way. . . . ‘Blue Beard,’ that little tragic and dramatic masterpiece, moves me yet; I still tremble for Puss in Boots when the ogre turns into a lion; and still one’s heart goes with the girl who seeks her lost and enchanted lover, and wins him again in the third night of watching and of tears. This may not seem a taste to be proud of, but it is a taste to be grateful for, like the love of any other thing that is old and plain, and dallies with the simplicity of love.”

  “Introduction.” In Blue Fairy Book. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1975. Pp. 349–58.

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  “If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”

  All Things Considered. New York: J. Lane Co., 1908. Pp. 255–56.

  JOHN RUSKIN

  “Let [the little reader] know his fairy tale accurately, and have perfect joy or awe in the conception of it as if it were real; thus he will always be exercising his power of grasping realities: but a confused, careless, and discrediting tenure of the fiction will lead to a confused and careless reading of the fact. Let the circumstances of both be strictly perceived, and long dwelt upon, and let the child’s own mind develop fruit of thought from both. It is of the greatest importance early to secure this habit of contemplation, and therefore it is a grave error, either to multiply unnecessarily, or to illustrate with extravagant richness, the incidents presented to the imagination.”

  “Introduction.” In German Popular Stories. London: C. Baldwyn, 1823. Pp. v–xiv.

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

  The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949. P. 4.

  TERRY PRATCHETT

  “People think stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way round. . . . A thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. . . . Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.”

  Witches Abroad. London: V. Gollancz, 1991. Pp. 2–3.

  A. S. BYATT

  “We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends. Storytelling in general, and the Thousand and One Nights in particular, consoles us for endings with endless new beginnings. I finished my condensed version of the frame story with the European fairy-tale ending, ‘they lived happily ever after,’ which is a consolatory false eternity, for no one does, except in the endless repetitions of storytelling. Stories are like genes, they keep part of us alive after the end of our story, and there is something very moving about Scheherazade entering on the happiness ever after, not at her wedding, but after 1001 tales and three children.”

  “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” In On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Pp. 165–71.

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  “When people say ‘sexist fairy tales,’ they probably mean the anthologies that concentrate on ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Cinderella,’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ and leave out everything else. But in ‘my’ version, there are a good many forgetful or imprisoned princes who have to be rescued by the clever, brave, and resourceful princess, who is just as willing to undergo hardship and risk her neck as are the princes engaged in dragon slaying and tower climbing. Not only that, they’re usually better at spells.

  And where else could I have gotten the idea, so early in life, that words can change you?”

  “Grimms Remembered.” In The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, ed. Donald Haase. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Pp. 290–92.

  ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

  “My mother began with fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, with Greek and Roman mythology, especially as marvelously rendered by Hawthorne in The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales; and with the wondrous Arabian Nights. . . . Great children’s literature creates new worlds that children enter with delight and perhaps with apprehension and from which they return with understandings that their own experience could not have produced and that give their lives new meaning. . . . The classical tales have populated the common imagination of the West. They are voyages of discovery. They introduce children to the existential mysteries—the anxiety of loneliness, the terror of rejection, the need for comradeship, the quest for fulfillment, the struggle against fate, victory, love, death. . . . The classical tales tell children what they unconsciously know—that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, that life is harsh before it is happy—and thereby reassure them about their own fears and their own sense of self.”

  A Life in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Pp. 61–64.

  JI-LI JIANG

  “Grandpa Hong’s bookstall was on the corner of the entrance of our alley. All the children in the neighborhood loved the stall and Grandpa Hong, with his gray hair and wispy beard. He would look at us through his old yellowed glasses and smile. He knew just which books each of us liked best and that I would choose fairy tales, Ji-yong would get adventure stories, and Ji-yun would want animal stories. . . . Against the walls in the place were hard wood benches that rocked on the uneven mud floor. We would sit in a row on one of these benches, each of us with a pile of twenty-one picture books, and read them, one after another. Then we would trade piles and read again. This was how I met many beloved friends: the Monkey King, the River Snail Lady, Snow White, Aladdin, and many others. Inside the bookstall I traveled to mysterious places to meet ancient beauties or terrible monsters. Often I forgot where I was.”

  Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution. New York: Harper Trophy, 1998. P. 20.

  ROSA PARKS

  “I was already reading when I started school. My mother taught me at home. She was really my first teacher. I don’t remember when I first started reading, but I must have been three or four. I was very fond of books, and I liked to read and I liked to count. I thought it was something great to be able to take a book and sit down and read, or what I thought was reading. Any books I found where I couldn’t read the words, I made up a story about it and talked about the pictures.

  At school I liked fairy tales and Mother Goose rhymes. I remember trying to find Little Red Riding Hood because someone had said it was a nice book to read.”

  Rosa Parks: My Story, with Jim Haskins. New York: Puffin, 1992. P. 25.

  ROBERT GRAVES

  “Children born of fairy stock

  Never need for shirt or frock,

  Never want for food or fire,

  Always get their heart’s desire . . .”

  “I’d Love to Be a Fairy’s Child.”

  In Fairies and Fusiliers. New York: Knopf, 1918.

  JOSEPHINE EVETTS-SECKER

  “These stories live by ‘endless mutation.’ A Native American tale claims that the source of the story is the ‘story-telling stone,’ which first says to its first listeners, ‘Some of you will remember every word I say, some will remember a part of the words, and surely some will forget them all. Hereafter, you must tell these stories to eac
h other. . . . you must keep them for as long as the world lasts.’ ”

  Mother and Daughter Tales. New York: Abbeville Press, 1996. P. 7.

  ADELINE YEN MAH

  “In one way or another, every one of us has been shaped by the stories we have read and absorbed in the past. All stories, including fairy tales, present elemental truths, which can sometimes permeate your inner life and become part of you.”

  Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter. New York: Random House, Laurel-Leaf, 1999. P. xi.

  LEWIS CARROLL

  “Child of the pure, unclouded brow

  And dreaming eyes of wonder!

  Though time be fleet and I and thou

  Are half a life asunder,

  Thy loving smile will surely hail

  The love-gift of a fairy tale.”

  Through the Looking Glass.

  London: Macmillan & Co., 1870.