Dedicated to the study of fairy tales and fairies.              .

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Fairy Tale Stories      Children's Fairy Tales      Fairies       Faery Woodlands Magazine      Blog     About Fairy Tale Interpretation For interpretations of specific fairy tales see Fairy Tale Meaning Index Introduction Types of Interpretation Historical Religion Cross Cultural Psychology Emotions and Events Connections with other people Fairy Tales Today Introduction (Fairy tales change) Once upon a time, when technology was young and most people still lived or died by the sweet of their brow, people told each other the stories we know call fairy tales. They told stories for entertainment on long dark nights after a hard days work. They told stories to transmit their culture, their ideas and the lessons to their children. They told stories to better understand the world which surrounded them, a world which they believed to be filled with fairies; beings over which they had very little control but which had a great amount of control over them. For fairy means the bringer of fate, they are those who make human fate what they wish it to be. Fate was controlled in a large part by others in the belief system of these people because they had so little control. The fields could be blighted, the cattle could grow sick, the rain might not come, a plague could sweep through their village and there was little they could do about it. So despite their attempts to teach the messages of their stories and transfer their culture, things happened to them and their culture that were beyond their control. For these people, the peasants who told the stories we now call fairy tales had very little control over the world. So even as they tried to pass on their culture, traditions and ideas something happened to them. Their culture began to change. At times this change was gradual, like the morphing of Old English into the many modern accents of the English language, other times the change was rapid such as when Germany switched from being a Celtic to a Germanic land or the conversion to the new religion. Famines drove people from their homes or invaders into their lands over and over again. Ideas and words were borrowed from distant lands. As people changed so to did their stories, for the fairy tale is always evolving and morphing. Thus these stories were passed not simply from person to person, but from culture to culture, from generation to generation. They thus became a mean of humanity, a means of understanding the many lands from whence they came for in some stories there are contained the thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams which touched the lives of hundreds of people to whom the story had been passed and who in turned altered and passed on the story themselves. This is what makes the fairy tale so powerful, because it is told by not one person but by generations of people. People to when through cycles of prosperity and unimaginable poverty. Through joy and horror, from times when starvation required them to abandon their children to times when raging hordes from unknown lands destroyed everything they  held dear, to quite times when they would have gathered enough food for the winter and so could sit calmly in the evening around an oven filled with baking bread as they told stories. So it was that these people experienced the defeat of having illness kill half their population, and the triumph of building the Renaissance and found room to dream, and children and spouses who loved them. Many of the stories we now know were collected after these people had had the courage to rise up against the darkness, the courage to overthrow their lords. Thus fairy tales have their roots in many places including despair but many of them went through periods of triumph. Fairy tales then are a living breathing thing, which take place in strange and wondrous worlds. For the world of fairy tales is a strange world of magic and unparalleled human emotion. These stories are often the raw uncensored fears of the humans who created them, fromt eh dark woodlands to cannibals, to incest and wicked stepmothers. These stories tell the history of cultures and humans as few things can. Not as events which occurred but which had little immediate impact on the lives of the peasants on the majority of people, but as the thoughts and ideas of the people telling them. This is the power of fairy tales, because they have been passed on so long that they speak to us, because they are so simple that they may morph they may change and in changing they stay relevant. For while the Europeans many seem to have little to do with East Asia they can still pass the Cinderella story between them, and while we have changed a lot since then we can still change this same story over and over again to be relevant in our lives and our world. Its true that the fact that so many people have touched on fairy tales makes their interpretation and origins difficult to discern. After all there are many symbols which have been altered, taken out and added in over time. But this is what makes the interpretation of fairy tales so exciting, because it is a puzzle with so many parts which were created by so many different peoples. Types of interpretation Because fairy tales change, because they are touched by and touch so many people there are many ways to interpret them. One can choose for example to understand fairies as historical artifacts which tell us about the culture of ancient peoples. On the other hand fairy tales are living and changing things so one can choose to understand them in the context of our world, the world in which they still live. It is us after all who are the one fairy tales are changing even as we change them. Finally a person can try to interpret what fairy tales mean about the human mind, about the relationships of one culture, one group of people to another. Thus there are three ways by which we may understand fairy tales; historical, literary and psychological. A Historical Analysis of Fairy Tales Fairy tales rarely if ever depict what could be considered truly historical events. Certainly there are tales of real people, Charlemagne, for example.  Yet the tales of Charlemagne involve him riding hippogriffs, talking to nixes, and working with knights he likely never actually had as his story gets mixed with other fairy tales and is changed as its passed down from person to person. The stories about the bear and leshii (the forest kings) of Russia turn into stories about Saint Nicholas. The tales of Odin turn into stories of Charlemagne leading a wild hunt through the woods. These changes occurred both because of the formulas used to remember fairy tales and the changes in culture but also because the original stories of history were not so relevant to the lives of most people. What than can we get from fairy tales? We better understand a people’s religion, psychology, emotions and their connections with other people. Religion Part of the definition often given for fairy tales is that they aren’t religious in nature, but how true is this? For while it’s certain that many of them exist purely for entertainment can any fairy tale of Jesus be completely non-religious in nature? How about folktales with characters which used to be religious? No matter how non-religious fairy tales may same they can still show what people believed and what they used to believe. As Haney (1999) points out people thought that fairy tales were true, or at least had been. As one teller of these tales says as an explanation of the strange events in her tales “that’s just the way things were back then…. Why would the elders start fibbing.” There was a belief that at least once upon a time fairies walked the fields more openly, that animals talked to men, that there was a much freer and more wondrous world. We must then look at fairy tales within the context of how they would impact people not simply as stories, as moral lessons, but also what impact they would have on people who actually believed the stories they were hearing. These tales to those listening to them once upon a time were to some extent historical stories. Further given the nature of some of these stories, especially those known specifically as fairy tales or wonder tales one must accept that there is to some extent a certain amount of religious idea’s within the fairy tales themselves. Finally along fairy tales can be used as a means of understanding what people once believed. After all many fairy tales owe their existence to the mythological and religious beliefs that a people once held. This is certainly not to say that everyone believed folktales, but it seems likely that the vast majority of the population did. One must understand that nearly all European and Asian societies had two groups of people; the upper and the lower castes. That these people’s beliefs about the world in general would have been very different as the worlds they lived in were clearly extremely different. Imagine if you well an entire society of people stretching across the Eurasian landmass who are not allowed to have education, who in some cases can’t even speak the language of their religious services, who don’t know anyone who can read. Imagine also that their concerns or very different from those of the upper class. For them the mystical and philosophical world debated by the other caste didn’t matter so much as did the natural world. When one is struggling to eat, to plant crops, when one is worried about wolves in the forest, or an illness that can wipe out the crops, one doesn’t necessarily care about heroic deeds or philosophy except as an interesting story. For such people what matters is their immediate needs, which are many and which are not always fulfilled by the religion or mythology of the upper classes. This is why long after most people stopped believing in fairies people still offered these creatures bread, or tied pieces of cloth around trees for them, or would try to chase away the bad natural spirits with brooms and bits of iron.   People tended to have a negative view of these “peasants tales,” and “old wives tales,” for many years. One critic stated that such tales should be “regulated to the very simplest taverns and pothouses. Any imaginative peasant can think of ten similar ones without difficulty, which, were they all to be put to press, would be a waste of paper, pens, ink, and typographic letters, not to mention the labors of the gentlemen writers” (Haney, 1999). The differences between these two classes is so extreme that at times they used different forms of currency which had to be exchanged for the other as if they were from different countries. This is why penning down the beliefs of ancient people can be so difficult, because the there was not one set of beliefs among a people their were two different traditions. Further each individual group of people had their own traditions and beliefs and any individual person might have their own unique ideas. Thus it was easy for the same province or region to have many ideas which contradicted each other at times or which at the very least didn’t seem to go together. Thus putting together the beliefs of any ancient people is like trying to put together a puzzle in which many pieces don’t fit together and many more pieces are missing all together. One can’t be surprised then if all the pieces don’t fit together. For further discussion on fairy tales as tales of fairies and religious tales please see fairies and In search of Europe’s first religion Cross-Cultural Psychology Understanding the thoughts and emotions that went intot he development of fairy tales can be challenging at best but a good understanding Cross-Cultural psychology is still important to understanding fairy tales. It’s extremely important to note that this does not mean psychoanalytic is important. The work of Freud and Jung have been shown time and time again to be false. They put too much stock into there being specific deep seated thoughts which all people had or struggled with which could be analyzed like bad literature. The reality is that all people exist within a society and so their interpretation of the same story and events can be completely different. Two people could hear the Cinderella story and interpret it in two very distinct ways. In the modern Western society a “Cinderella Story” has come to mean the tale of an underdog rising to greatness. The reality, however, is that Cinderella was the wealthy girl and her step mother was the peasant. She was the one with princess feet, the original tale was about the danger of rising above ones station, about the dangers of marrying a peasant woman to be the “evil” stepmother of your child. Thus while the same fairy tale might spread from culture to culture its meaning will change according to the culture it’s in. As we go further back then it becomes ever more difficult to understand how stories impacted people psychologically. Emotions and Events With the advent of the industrial revolution the semi-educated and skilled labor classes suddenly found themselves without work. Few people after all needed a tailor when factories could churn out clothes in mass. Tailors then become travelers, people uprooted from their sedentary lifestyle who were then forced to go from city to city, begging for work. Suddenly there was a situation in which a skilled and often intelligent person was the vagabond who had to figure out how to survive. This is likely the reason the tailor features in so many fairy tales about intelligent and cunning vagabonds. Understanding this aspect of history then can help us better understand fairy tales, further such fairy tales can help us understand the views of at least one set of people of these events. Connections with other people There is this mistaken tendency to view various people of Eurasia as having lived in a bubble, developing their ideas without outside influence. As their being drastic differences between one group of people and their neighbors but the idea of solid borders between people is a modern invention, and even now borders tend to be porous with only a few exceptions. Information traveled, one girl might travel a few villages over to be married, one group of soldiers might raid a neighboring kingdom or even a land thousands of miles from home and then settle down. Merchants, minstrels and various other vagabonds would hear a story in one village and carry it to the next. When fairy tales can last survive thousands of years we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that they can survive thousands of miles and it is the similarities between fairy tales can be interpreted by and help us interpret the spread of information and of people. This is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of fairy tales is the fact that they are able to travel from culture to culture, showing not only how each culture will interpret and alter the same tale but how information and ideas were able to spread thousands of years ago. For example the Germans and the people of India both held in their epics that the world was created from the body of the first being who’d died and been dismembered. The Germans Share their story of puss in boots with the people of Lithuania with the exception that in one country “Puss” is a cat and in the other they are a fox. The Greeks and the Japanese both have tales of girls who’s scarves allow them to be heavenly beings. The nymphs were one of the most important religious beings in Gaul, Rome, Greece, and Russia. Thus the interpretation of the confusing aspects of any one fairy tale can be interpreted through its relation to another culture. Fairy tales today Fairy tales have been passed down to us, to our generation and the culture and world in which we now live. This means that it is our turn to interpret, understand and yes even change the fairy tales to fit our own needs and desires. For this is what a fairy tale is, it’s an evolving cultural artifact one which connects us with the past but provides us with a moral compass for our own lives. Thus to understand what impact fairy tales well have one must understand what they will mean to people today. It is unfortunate that most of the work done in this area is done by psychoanalysts. Certainly some of these people have been right here or there but this was despite rather then because of their approach to such understanding. Psychoanalysis as I’ve mentioned previously has been proven time and again to have too many errors to be truly useful. We must than continue on to gain understanding of fairy tales within their social contexts utilizing literary, social psychological, anthropological, and similar interpretations. The challenge to this is that we tend to see what we want to see, or worse still we tend to see what no one else well, at least not with any practical ease. Even when a message is there it only matters if it has an emotional impact or if it reflects something. Thus to be useful the interpretation of fairy tales in the modern day must either reflect our society or the tellers and audience of the story or they must help to shape and or alter peoples perception. After all meaning isn’t assigned to a fairy tale, its not dragged out of it, meaning is what people understand. For the moment I’m primarily working on a historical understanding of the fairy tale, I will however continue to write more about the modern interpretation of them over time.