Let me tell you a secret (about my heart)
Mar. 21st, 2010 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
barefootsongFairy tales have been part of me since as far back as I can remember. The first fairy tale I remember loving was Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe. I loved the beautiful illustrations, and especially the cute little garden snake.
I pored over the 398s on my trips to the library as a young girl. I'd wander around the other sections, too, but I spent longer looking through the fairy tale shelves for old favorites and undiscovered tales.
When I started college, I began hanging around the GRs at the school library while still lingering in the 398s at the public library.
And in my junior year, I took a course on Russian Fairy Tales. We read Afanasyev's collection of tales, as well as books about folk traditions and fairy tale theories. And I became interested in Baba Yaga, the Russian witch, who is now my favorite stock character from any fairy tale. I had encountered her before, in the tale of [Vasilisa the Brave] (aka Vasilisa the Beautiful, but I prefer to refer to the tale by the heroine's bravery rather than her beauty), which is one of the few tales popular enough tale to be illustrated for Western readers. But I had not known that Baba Yaga was a recurring character in fairy tales. And, unlike the mostly nameless witches of Western tales, she has more of a sense of character. She is changeable—in one tale, like in Vasilisa's, she is helpful (although grudgingly), while in the next, she is cruel. But she always lives in a house made of bones that stands on chicken legs and she always flies through the air in her mortar and pestle (and what a fascinating way to fly!). She is a witch, and therefore evil by fairy tale law, but she shows the complicated nature of evil. Evil is not simply a question of black and white; it is complicated by so many shades of gray.
Early in high school, I developed an obsession with Antarctica, and around the same time tales of ice and snow crept into my favorites. [The Snow Queen] and [East o' the Sun & West o' the Moon] fascinated me with their wintry wonderlands.
The constant in my life has always been [Beauty & the Beast] and [its variants]. East o' the Sun is a Norwegian version, but before that I loved the French tale. And in my Russian Fairy Tales class, The Little Scarlet Little Flower (there are two diminutives in the Russian title) became another beloved variation.
An African tale of two sisters and a garden snake, a changeable Russian witch, tales of ice and snow, and tales of love and transformation....
Is it true that nothing reveals more
about a person's secret heart
than the adult memory of a favorite
childhood fairy tale?
~Margarita Engle, from ["Archetype"]
Further reading:
[SurLaLune Fairy Tales]: My favorite fairy tale resource online. One-stop shopping for annotated tales, public domain fairy tale collections, modern retellings, and beautiful illustrations.
[The Journal of Mythic Arts]: The journal is no longer in publication, but the archive of past articles from 2003 to 2008 is still available and still full of wonderful reading material.
There are far too many blogs in the world to read them all, so I only follow a few with any regularity. The two fairy tale blogs I always make time for are the [SurLaLune Blog] (by the same wonderful author as the website of the same name) and [Once Upon a Blog...]. Both provide fascinating glimpses of fairy tales and folklore in pop culture, as well as providing interesting things to think about.
I pored over the 398s on my trips to the library as a young girl. I'd wander around the other sections, too, but I spent longer looking through the fairy tale shelves for old favorites and undiscovered tales.
When I started college, I began hanging around the GRs at the school library while still lingering in the 398s at the public library.
And in my junior year, I took a course on Russian Fairy Tales. We read Afanasyev's collection of tales, as well as books about folk traditions and fairy tale theories. And I became interested in Baba Yaga, the Russian witch, who is now my favorite stock character from any fairy tale. I had encountered her before, in the tale of [Vasilisa the Brave] (aka Vasilisa the Beautiful, but I prefer to refer to the tale by the heroine's bravery rather than her beauty), which is one of the few tales popular enough tale to be illustrated for Western readers. But I had not known that Baba Yaga was a recurring character in fairy tales. And, unlike the mostly nameless witches of Western tales, she has more of a sense of character. She is changeable—in one tale, like in Vasilisa's, she is helpful (although grudgingly), while in the next, she is cruel. But she always lives in a house made of bones that stands on chicken legs and she always flies through the air in her mortar and pestle (and what a fascinating way to fly!). She is a witch, and therefore evil by fairy tale law, but she shows the complicated nature of evil. Evil is not simply a question of black and white; it is complicated by so many shades of gray.
Early in high school, I developed an obsession with Antarctica, and around the same time tales of ice and snow crept into my favorites. [The Snow Queen] and [East o' the Sun & West o' the Moon] fascinated me with their wintry wonderlands.
The constant in my life has always been [Beauty & the Beast] and [its variants]. East o' the Sun is a Norwegian version, but before that I loved the French tale. And in my Russian Fairy Tales class, The Little Scarlet Little Flower (there are two diminutives in the Russian title) became another beloved variation.
An African tale of two sisters and a garden snake, a changeable Russian witch, tales of ice and snow, and tales of love and transformation....
Is it true that nothing reveals more
about a person's secret heart
than the adult memory of a favorite
childhood fairy tale?
~Margarita Engle, from ["Archetype"]
Further reading:
[SurLaLune Fairy Tales]: My favorite fairy tale resource online. One-stop shopping for annotated tales, public domain fairy tale collections, modern retellings, and beautiful illustrations.
[The Journal of Mythic Arts]: The journal is no longer in publication, but the archive of past articles from 2003 to 2008 is still available and still full of wonderful reading material.
There are far too many blogs in the world to read them all, so I only follow a few with any regularity. The two fairy tale blogs I always make time for are the [SurLaLune Blog] (by the same wonderful author as the website of the same name) and [Once Upon a Blog...]. Both provide fascinating glimpses of fairy tales and folklore in pop culture, as well as providing interesting things to think about.
