Fairy Tales & Folklore for Adults: An Introduction

(A photo of the materials cart I speak of in the above video, which is currently residing next to my desk at work.)

On magic & enchantment: I talked about the aesthetic of fairy-tales as being a sign (the semiotic sign) of the fairy-tale form. I didn't go much into specifics - I'm still working on building my knowledge on this subject - so - much of what I said was still in the abstract. But here is what I meant by an essential enchantment and magic within the fairy-tale.

If a cup talks, or a dresser, or if there are angels who whisper to you in the night: that's a form of enchantment. There is no known reason for it. It is just there, a cup or a dresser talking, angels who tell you things you don't quite remember when you wake up (see Robin McKinley's re-tellings of Beauty & the Beast: Rose Daughter & Beauty). It is accepted as such, as magic, and, although these give various emotional textures to the story and characters, there is no particular reason for it nor is there a reason for it to be understood scientifically, that is, logically and reasonably. It is understood as part and parcel of the fabric of reality within the story.

From the introduction to Victorian Fairy Tales from Oxford, Michael Newton describes the fairy-tale form further:

Some have decried the literary fairy tale as sentimental, escapist, and kitsch. Though much substandard work was published, in the finest examples there is a lot of tough-mindedness, wit and genuine humour, as well as cognizance of suffering, and traces too of the numinous. The literary fairy story involves the fantastic, a supernatural that is neither eerie nor horrific, but rather is whimsical, playful, or invitingly strange."

I always want to reiterate this point: That is not to say whimsy without madness, playful without darkness, strange without the uncanny. But all those nonetheless, with no bloodletting and ghost tremor chills, just plain enchantment. 

And so we have a father, lost in the woods with a sick horse in the deadest of winter, when he approaches a clearing full of the strong scent of thousand orange trees. A castle looms ahead of him with each one of its numerous rooms filled with the lights of candles and chandeliers, the doors and gates open for him as if to welcome him in, and he accepts it all. A stable for his horse, filled with fresh hay, and the horse revives into a complete state of health. It is madness, sure, strange, but he accepts it because he is starving, depressed beyond belief, cold almost to frostbite, and so he understands it for what it is, a gift, no explanations necessary.

I like what Padriac Colum states in his introduction to The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales: 

They put a thing in the center of the story and it gave a pattern. What an advantage it is to a storyteller to have a feeling for the value, for the uniqueness of a thing! Things remain real while mental states become doubtful to us... the golden slipper on the stairway is what the incidents in "Cinderella" lead up to and away from. And the gold of the slipper puts into greater obscurity the drably dressed girl crouched by the ashes. In "Snow White" there is the looking glass of the wicked queen which is doubled in the glass coffin in which Snow White is laid by the kindly dwarfs. In "Briar Rose" there is the spindle that is doubled in the thorns that hedge the castle. In "The Goose Girl" the horse's head that speaks is doubled in the hat the wind blows away, and in "King's Thrushbeard" the crockery which the king's daughter has to sell is doubled in the jars which, as the kitchen maid, she uses to bring the dinner leavings home, and which break, too. These correspondences are like rhymes which chance gives a poet and which, duly set down, gives his poem a happy completeness. Another kind of correspondence is in "Rapunzel": the maid has long hair and the witch confines her in a tower, and we do not know whether the tower makes it proper she should have long hair, or whether her long hair makes the tower part of the story." 

We could ask, when we happen upon a fairy tale, what is the magic object in this one and how is it enchanted? Further, what does it do? In Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale, as you might guess, the magic is not within a object as such but with the bird, the animal, the Nightingale, who has the most beautiful song anyone has ever known. How the bird came to have this song we don't know, but what we must think about is whether or not it is replaceable, its value, its worth: its enchantment.

- F