“Come! Oh human child!
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
From The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” – C.S. Lewis
Some of the best known and loved writers of all times have believed in the fey, and written and collected fairy tales. Not only Oscar Wilde, but his compatriot W.B. Yeats, and C.S. Lewis, all believed in the fey and wrote tales about them. Many of these stories were not meant for children alone, but also as teaching stories for adults.
Oscar Wilde used his needle sharp wit to poke at the pretentions and conventions of the high society of his times under the guise of fairy tales. C.S. Lewis told us that, “A book worth reading only in childhood, is not worth reading at all.”
Yet, fairy tales somehow became regulated to the nursery, fables, folklore, “old wives tales”, told only as fantasies to entertain children.
Then along came a scholar, J.R.R. Tolkein, who wrote a book influenced, if not based upon, his studies of these tales as a linguist. “The Hobbit” and then the “Lord of the Rings” series of books suddenly brought the fairy tale back to adults and made them respectable again.
Once again, fantasy becomes the realm of teaching. The hero’s tale, however retold, of one person, quite an everyday person, who rises to something more, learning all along the way the true values of friendship, loyalty, courage, and honor.
We are told that we love these stories because they are “just” fantasy. But the truth is that we love these stories because they remind us of what we can be, what we can become, what we can do, if only we allow ourselves to take risks and to learn, to give and to receive.
The magic in the sword is the power of a single minded dedication to create and defend what is right and beautiful in the world. The book of magic spells is the wisdom distilled from the stories of many ordinary lifetimes. The nimble feats of a thief, (or treasure hunter, if you prefer) are little more than common sense applied to uncommon occasions.
And the finest part of all of this is that unlike the drudgery of memorizing names and dates, or practicing multiplication and division, or copying lines over and over again, listening to or reading a fairy tale accomplishes true teaching without the student being aware (and thus resistant) to it’s purpose. Children remember these delightful tales well into their adulthood, far better than they recall the multiplication tables! And while they are not likely to recite the tables for their own children, they will certainly tell them the tales they were told, share with them their favorite books and stories, and without even knowing it, instill in their own children the sense of wonder, of honor, of integrity, and of rising to a challenge when necessary.
Even when a generation or two of adults has turned away from “fantasy” and insisted on “logic”, the children will find the tales and thereby teach themselves. It falls to us only to not unteach them by disparaging their favorite stories of the hero’s defeating the monsters.
For there are still monsters to be defeated and trials to be faced.
Summer Fey Foovay