A Quote by J. R. R. Tolkien
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
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Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.
One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.
I believe that our lives, just like fairy tales - the stories that have been written by us humans, through our own experiences of living - will always have a Hero and a Heroine, a Fairy Godmother and a Wicked Witch.
The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
Kiran says (the shelf) is full of stories. If it is, then I like fairy stories. Fairy stories are fair. In them wishes are granted, words are enchanted, the honest and brave make it safely through to the last page and the baddies either have to give up their wickedness for ever and ever, no going back, or get ruthlessly written out of the story, which they hardly ever survive. Also in fairy stories there are hardly any of those half-good half-bad people that crop up so constantly in real life and are so difficult to believe in.
I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.
If you are watching a fairy tale, that's why you go to fairy tales: you want these uncomplicated stories and uncomplicated characters. But if it's meant to be real life, you want there to be some reflection of your experience and have something you can hook into.
The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.
William Shakespeare was the most remarkable storyteller that the world has ever known. Homer told of adventure and men at war, Sophocles and Tolstoy told of tragedies and of people in trouble. Terence and Mark Twain told cosmic stories, Dickens told melodramatic ones, Plutarch told histories and Hans Christian Andersen told fairy tales. But Shakespeare told every kind of story – comedy, tragedy, history, melodrama, adventure, love stories and fairy tales – and each of them so well that they have become immortal. In all the world of storytelling he has become the greatest name.
Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because--despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content--these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.
I think the big thing is the fairy tale. It's taking old folk fairy tales and retelling them in modern day. I think it's just taking you out of everyday life, and everyone loves a good fairy tale.
The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog - undervalued and undermined - even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.
Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.
I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.
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