The
Background
Where do Fairy Tales
come from?
Fairy tales started off like all other tales thousands of
years ago: as a way of passing on wisdom and knowledge from one generation to
another. The original focus of the tales was to try to explain the unanswerable
questions that people had about the world. Why does the sun set and rise
instead of shining all day? Why do the seasons change? What causes thunder and
lightning? These tales invented Gods to explain the inexplicable thereby making
the world a less scary and randomly unpredictable place.
Gods are essentially little more than human-like forces that
can intervene in the world and change it in understandable ways. Hence, for the
Greeks, the sun was pulled across the sky by the god Apollo in a horse drawn
chariot: all things that the Ancient Greeks would have comfortably understood.
Winter is explained as the sadness the Goddess Hera feels upon her daughter
Persephone’s annual visit to hell whereas Spring is
joy at her return. Lightning, most famously, is caused by the wrath of Zeus.
As time passed Science explained why the sun sets and rises
but fairy tales did not become redundant: they were simply used to pass on a
different kind of wisdom and knowledge. Folk tales in Feudal England often
showed all members of a family being cunning and quick witted as these were the
skills required to survive in a harsh world where food and money were scarce.
To fit the harshness of the world the punishments meted out for failure were
far more severe – the ugly stepsisters in the original German version of
Cinderella have their eyes picked out by birds at the end of the tale.
However, from about the mid 1600’s onwards, when the quality
of life started to rise gradually for even the very poor, fairy tales were used
as instructional stories for young children. They stressed the attributes that
children were supposed to need when they grew up in order to live successful
moral lives as adults. These attributes were different for boys and girls but a
typical list would involve the following things that I’m sure you will
recognise from many fairy tales that are still current today:
Boys: Intelligence, Bravery, Courage
Girls: Obedience,
Patience, Silence, Honesty, Chastity, Gentility, Humility, Cleanliness, Being
Hard Working, Not talking to strangers, Not being too curious, Not arguing back
and, most importantly, being beautiful,
No doubt it will not be long before fairytale heroes are
those who remember to cautiously back up their data on DVDs in case their
computer crashes.
The Authors:
Charles Perrault (1628-1703) – Cinderella
The Brothers Grimm (1785 – 1853) – Collected almost every
major fairy tale we have today
Hans Christian Anderson (1805 – 1875) The
Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid
Walt Disney (1901 – 1966) Began his
animation of fairytales with Snow White in 1937