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Faith Moore
Hello and welcome to Storytime for Grown Ups. I'm Faith Moore and this is Summer Session. Normally on Storytime for Grown Ups, we read classic literature a few chapters at a time with a few notes along the way, like an audiobook with built in notes. But during the summer we switch things up a little. From now until September, we will be in Summer Session, which is sort of like a college class, only fun. This summer we're exploring fairy tales and their relationship to the books we've read this year on storytime and storytelling more broadly. We'll do this in once a week episodes, which will drop on Mondays. If this doesn't sound like your thing, don't worry. Storytime will be back with a new book in September. But for now, brew a pot of tea, find a cosy chair and settle in. Class is in session. Hello. Welcome back. I miss you guys on Thursdays. Now this is hard. I mean, I'm really excited about fairy tales and I, I loved chatting with Bows last week. I thought that was a really cool and fun way to kick this off. And you guys have been writing in saying you thought so too. So thank you, thank you for those emails and for letting me know how you're doing at this point. But I do feel the lack of the Thursday episodes. And you know, I've been getting some emails from you guys saying that, you know, if you hadn't read some of the books that we've done before, like Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, some of you now get to go back and listen to those. But I know that some of you are in real time, that you're actually here in real time and you don't have anything to go back and listen to. And so I, I guess it just makes us all the more excited for September when we get to go back to twice a week and read a book together. But this is really fun and exciting too. So what I would like to do today is talk a little bit about the history of fairy tales. A brief history, a very brief history of fairy tales to kind of situate us in the topic that we're going to be talking about all summer. And then of course, we'll get to read a bunch of these stories and talk about them and talk about what they mean for stories in general. So this episode is going to be one of the kinds of episodes that's just me talking to you. Last time I said there would be a few different kinds of episodes. There would be interviews. We had one of those last week. There would be episodes where I'm just talking to you and telling you about something. That's what we're going to do now. And we'll have the kind of episodes where I am reading to you some of these amazing stories. And that will be what we're going to do next week and for many of the other episodes to come. So before we do any of that, all the usual reminders are still in effect. Please make sure that you are subscribed. Please tell a friend about this show if you haven't already. This is a great time to join in on something new. So tell a friend and if you're able to support the show financially, there's a link in the show notes to my Buy me a coffee page. Of course you'd be buying me a tea, but it's basically just a tip jar. You can leave a little donation if that's something that you're able or interested in doing. And you can also become a member, a Storytime for Grownups member, which gets you access to our online community, which is called the Drawing room, as in withdrawing room. We withdraw after the show to our online community where we keep the conversation going. We're talking all about fairy tales over there. You can talk about the other books that you're reading. So if you've gone back and you're listening to, like Jane Eyre, for example, there's a channel there you can talk with other people about Jane Eyre who've read the book too. And there's conversations about all kinds of different things going on over there. And we have our monthly Tea Times, which are voice chats with me and other storytime listeners that you can join if you are a member of the Landed gentry membership tier. And I've actually scheduled the next tea time, the tea time for June. It's going to be Tuesday, June 24th at 8pm Eastern over in the drawing room. And if you are not already a member, but you would like to, if this sounds interesting to you and you'd like to join that tea time, just scroll into the show notes, click on the link. It's not going to automatically sign you up or take your money or anything like that. It'll just give you a little bit more information. And if you'd like to join, this is a great time. And then you can join us for for that tea time on June 24th and I'll remind you again as it gets closer. But since our episodes are only weekly now, I wanted to let you know far in advance because I will only have a couple more opportunities to remind you before it actually happens. Okay, so I'd like to start this episode by reading you a comment that I got from last time, and I think that'll help us to kind of springboard into what I would like to discuss with you today. Okay, so this comment comes to us from Laura. Laura writes, wow, so much Garden of Eden in that cherry story. So she's talking about the story that Bows read to us last week about cherry going into the house where there was the strange man who was dancing in the well. Remember, if you missed that episode, go back and listen. It was great. I loved that we got to have some story time last week, even though we were just having an interview. But Bows read us this amazing and very strange story. So that is what Laura is talking about right now. So she says, so much Garden of Eden in that cherry story. The one rule motif must certainly be from there, and she was kicked out of the garden because she broke that rule and learned too much. What are we to learn from this? Okay, so I love this comment because it highlights something that we're going to be talking about a lot this summer, which is the ways that the elements and motifs in these fairy tales resonate with so many other stories. Right? You'll definitely see Christian imagery cropping up quite a bit. So there are connections to be made to Bible stories, for sure. But there will be all sorts of other connections I think, that you will start to make, not just with religious texts or myths or fables, but with books that were written recently or movies that you love or books your kids are reading at school. One of the main things that I hope that you're going to take away from this summer is that these stories, these fairy tales, are hold within them so many of the ideas and themes and tropes of just stories in general. So understanding these stories and what they mean and what they're trying to tell us really will open up, like, new worlds of understanding that will be relevant to any book you might be reading, old or new. And I think Laura's question, what are we to learn from this? Is a really valid and pertinent one because. And this is something I'm going to touch on in this episode, but these stories really are trying say something to us, not just in a kind of moralistic way like don't talk to strangers or be good or whatever, but also in a much deeper, much more universal way. And I'll talk more about that at the end of this episode. But these questions, like, what is this story saying? What are we meant to take Away from this. What does this actually mean? These questions are much more valid when reading fairy tales, I think, than they might be when reading, like, a modern novel or even a classic book, because they're a. Are hidden meanings in these stories. And the fact that there are so many recurring ideas and themes and motifs is a function of the fact that there's a kind of, like, secret language almost hidden in these stories. So today, what I'd like to do, as I say, is just to give you a very brief history of fairy tales. I want to talk about what a fairy tale actually is and give you a kind of overview of how we happen to have the fairy tales that we currently know. And then I'll end by discussing what I mean by this hidden language, this hidden meanings of fairy tales. And hopefully by the end of it, we'll be all set to actually start reading some fairy tales together and talking about what they mean, which is what we'll do next week, as I was saying. So we'll get started. But of course, don't forget to write in and ask me questions. Right. I assume that there's going to be some questions after this episode, because I'm going to keep reading comments and questions at the beginning of each episode, and that'll help us to further and deepen our understanding. So keep writing in faithkmoore.com and click on Contact, or just scroll into the show notes and click on the link that's there, and you can contact me that way. Okay. So, as we learned last week in our conversation with Bose Harrington, the definition of fairy tales can be a little amorphous because they are often lumped together with things like folk tales, myths, legends, etc, etc, and the boundaries are kind of fluid, and there's definitely a lot of overlap. So what I would like to do today is try to kind of tease out what exactly we mean when we talk about fairy tales and how the genre of fairy tales came to be and what its various iterations have been. Because it hasn't only been one thing. Over time, its definition and its audience and things like that have changed. And I think right off the bat, let's kind of narrow the field to what I guess I would call, like, the Western tradition of fairy tales. Right. Last week, Bose talked about some amazing fairy tales that come to us out of, like, the Middle east and China and other parts of Asia. And those stories really are amazing and often very strange and haunting. And if we had unlimited time or if this was a podcast that was only about fairy tales forever or something, Then we definitely get to those. But in the limited time that we have this summer, I would like to focus specifically on the tradition of fairy tales that comes to us largely from Europe, because I think it's these stories most of all that have influenced Western literature and the books that we've read on this show and that we will go on to read here on storytime and probably many of the books that you're reading in your. On your own time. So today I would like to go through a brief history of fairy tales within this European tradition and as a way to kind of orient ourselves and give us a framework and some context to work from as we talk about and read these stories for the rest of the summer. Okay. I think the first thing to understand about fairy tales is that they originate out of an oral tradition, okay? These were stories that were originally told out loud, often to children, often with a sort of underlying message of morality or safety or. Or both, like, be good, do the right thing, help people in need, or something really bad will happen to you. Okay? So that sort of thing. But these stories were completely oral. They weren't written down. They were often told by the peasants, right? The poorest of the poor within the social hierarchy. So people who probably couldn't have written them down if they'd wanted to because they couldn't read or write. So picture like, people huddled around their family, hearth mothers with their children on their knees, grandparents with their pipes, you know, that sort of thing. Telling stories to entertain each other and their children, and also to educate their children about good and evil, right and wrong, street smarts, right? Like, don't talk to strangers, don't veer off the path, things like that. And these oral versions of these stories had been around for generations and generations, probably thousands of years in some cases. And they got passed from parent to child or from friend to friend. And as they got passed down, they changed. Okay? So that's the next thing that's important to understand about fairy tales. There's no one, like, original, correct version of these stories. They come out of this tradition of passing on and then making your own. And one family might tell it one way and the next family might tell it another, or your mother might tell it to you one way. But then when you're telling your own kids, you might have forgotten a bit of it. So you add in your own elements, and that's the version that your kids pass on or whatever it is. And this kind of oral story tradition that I'm talking about now is usually what people are Talking about. When they talk about folk tales, okay, the folk of folk tales are these people, these peasants usually, who are telling these stories and changing them and embellishing them and adding bits and taking bits out and passing them on to the next person and everything like that. And as I say, that had been going on since basically time immemorial. But then something happened, okay, in the late 1600s, this type of story, these short stories with a moral or a message or just a sense of describing the world for children in this sort of fantastical but recognizable way, this type of story became very popular with French aristocrats, okay, so not the peasants anymore, not the poorest of the poor, but the wealthiest of the wealthy. And there were sort of two tracks that this interest took. One was as children's tales, still stories that could be told to children, particularly now with a message or a moral. But the other was for adults, particularly women, fashionable women, started sitting around and telling these sorts of stories to each other and changing them again and making them actually sort of risque in some instances and in some cases, not at all suitable for children. But the upshot of this French aristocratic interest in these stories was that they started to get written down. And in getting written down, they started to take on a level of fixedness that they hadn't had before. Not that there was a right version, okay, There were still lots of different versions of the same story. But now you could pass around a version that was the same. It was written down, and I could read it, and you could read it exactly the same, even if we didn't know each other. So there are two people that it makes sense to mention at this point. The first is a man named Charles Perrault. So Perrault was a wealthy French guy who was involved with various French institutions of learning devoted to literature and history. And he had a long and very distinguished career serving the French king Louis xiv. But eventually he got old and he lost his various positions. Essentially, he was kind of ousted so that younger men could come in and take his place. And he decided to devote himself to his children. And he began to write these children's stories with fantastical elements and a moral. And in 1967, he published a book called Histoire aux contes du temps passer avec et moralite, which translates to stories or tales from past times with morals. And then it had this subtitle or this alternate title, Contes de ma mer loy, which translates to the Tales of Mother Goose. So, interestingly, this is potentially the first appearance of Mother Goose which was basically just Perrault's way of giving the vibe that these were stories told by a kind of old grandmotherly lady to enthrall her grandchildren. These stories were not the sort of nursery rhymes that we now associate with Mother Goose. Those came about a century later, and they were in England, not France. But anyway, Perrault published this book, and in it are many of the stories that we think of when we hear the term fairy tales. Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots. Those are all in there, for example, and lots more. And while I'm saying that these stories were for children, it's important to note that children's literature wasn't really a concept back then, meaning there wasn't a specific genre of literature that was only for kids. So these stories would have been read to children, but adults would have read them as well. The origin of these stories is a little unclear, but Perrault obviously had some knowledge of folktales being told by the lower classes, because while he definitely added his own take and his own moral worldview, the origins of the stories can definitely be traced back to these tales that had been passed down orally for generations. So he's the first important person to note when it comes to the creation of the genre, which we now call fairy tales. And he's important because he wrote these stories in down and sort of solidified them for us. Though, of course, his versions are not the definitive versions. They just happen to have been written down when the others weren't. The other person that it's important to mention here is someone named Marie Catherine le Jumel de Barneville. Baroness d' Alnoy. Okay, so Baroness d' Alnoy was a contemporary of Perrault, and she is the person who actually coined the term fairy tales. In 1697, which was the same year that Perrault published his book, she published a book called Les Contes de Fe, which translates as fairy tales. So this is the origin of the term. And the book itself features the first instance of a character called Prince Charming. Baroness d' Aulnoy herself had a somewhat scandalous life. She was given to a much older man in marriage at the age of 15, and when she was 19, her husband was accused of treason by two men who were potentially Baroness d' alnoy's lovers. Eventually, though, the husband convinced everyone that he was innocent, and the men were arrested instead. Baroness d' Aulnoy had to flee, and she ended up escaping through a window and hiding in a church. So it's possible that she then became a French spy. But anyway, she published several books. But one of them was this book of so called fairy tales. Her stories were written for other women and they were read aloud at salons, these kind of fancy gatherings where people would meet to discuss literature and art and everything like that. And they often revolved around romance and happily ever afters, the way that we think of a lot of fairy tales today. But even though Baroness d' Aulnoy coined the term fairy tales, her stories are not as popular and aren't usually the stories that we think of when we think of fairy tales. But they too seem to have been influenced by folktales. Although again, she brought her own ideas and her own language to the stories. Okay, so from that oral tradition of folktales that had been going on since who knows how long, thousands of years, most likely, we get these first written stories that were derived from the folktales, but written clearly by these French aristocrats in the 1600s, with their own ideas and agendas baked into these written versions. There's one other person to mention even before Perrault and Dulnoil, and that is an Italian man named Giambattista Basile. And he was an Italian poet and courtier. He was born in the mid 1500s and he lived until 1632. And he also collected folktales and fairy tales. So he actually wrote some of these stories down before Perrault. And his works include fairy tales like Cinderella and Rapunzel. But his story collections kind of went unnoticed for a while. And during the fairy tale craze in France in the 1600s that I was just talking about, no one really knew about these stories. And even today, you don't hear so much about Basile. And it's really Perrault that's considered the father of fairy tales. But it's worth noting that actually there was a collection of fairy tales or folktales written down before Perrault. It just wasn't as widely known or known at all in some circles when these folktales and fairy tales really burst onto the scene in France. So after Perrault and Dulnoil, people continued to write fairy tales, and there were original stories like Beauty and the Beast, for example, that didn't have a specific oral tale that they were based on, but which used themes and ideas from folklore to craft these new narratives. So these stories continued to be a part of the fabric of the culture, particularly in France. But now let's fast forward a little over a hundred years from Perrault. And switch from France to Germany and we get to the Brothers Grimm. Okay, so the Grimmm's fairy tales is probably the most famous and most popular collection of fairy tales. Most people, when they think of fairy tales, can probably tell you something about the Brothers Grimm, even if they don't really know anything much about fairy tales at all. But it's interesting because the versions of fairy tales that appear in the Brothers Grimm versions are usually not the versions that we know from, like Disney or illustrated children's books or just from stories that we've been told as children. Those versions are much more likely to come from Perrault, even though most people haven't heard of Perrault and they have heard of the Grimms. So who were the Brothers Grimm? Well, they were two brothers, Jakob and Wilhelm, who were born in Germany in the 1780s. They were academics who became very interested in folk tales, right? These oral stories that had been passed down for centuries. But instead of writing their own versions of these stories, they decided to go and speak to ordinary people and ask them to tell them their favorite folktale. They spoke to peasants, but also to aristocrats, and they copied down the stories that they heard. Their interest coincided with a revived interest in these stories in Germany, and their work was of great interest to the public. And these stories, when they wrote them down, became very popular. Their first collection was called Children's and Household Tales, and it was published in 1812. So just for reference, for those of you who've been listening to Storytime for grown ups for a while now, Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, so right around the same time. And this book had tons of the stories that we think of when we think of fairy tales, like Cinderella, but a different version from Perrault's Rapunzel, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin and lots and lots more. So when the book first came out, it received a lot of criticism because these stories were often violent or sexually explicit or both. Okay. So Jakob and Wilhelm later rewrote many of these stories to make them more palatable for children and for the parents. For example, Rapunzel originally sleeps with the prince and is clearly pregnant. Okay. Also, in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, it was originally the mothers who were trying to kill the children, not the stepmothers. So they tone certain things down, but they, they also amped up some of the violence when it came to the punishment for the various bad guys. So if you've heard that the Grimm's fairy tales are kind of intense. You're right, they are. And they're far weirder than the stories that we see in Disney movies or whatever. But as it turns out, the folktales they were based on were even weirder than that. Okay, so this shift from France to Germany really affected the way that we think of fairy tales as well. A lot of the elements that we associate with fairy tales are specific to one or the other of these cultures. Okay, so like the Deep Dark Forest. Okay, which appears in a ton of fairy tales. That's specific to German folklore. Princes and princesses usually appear in French fairy tales, whereas it's kings, kings, sons and kings, daughters in the German. Fairies come from the French folktales, whereas enchantresses tend to come from the German ones. So those are the origins of fairy tales. There were these stories told for generations with magic and mystery and warnings to children, and all of this. They were first written down in the late 1600s by wealthy French people who became interested in this sort of story. There was another resurgence of interest in the early 18th, 1800s, with the brothers Grimm collecting these folktales and writing them down, ostensibly word for word, but then editing them to appeal to their specific audience. And after that, there have been other writers who have created their own original fairy tales. I'm thinking specifically here of Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote the Little Mermaid and the Snow Queen, among other stories, and of George MacDonald, who wrote the Princess and the Goblin, among others. These are stories that use many of these, the same images and tropes and ideas as these older stories, but have plots that are unique to those specific authors. And the last name that I think it's important to mention here, and Bose mentioned him in our interview last week as well, is Andrew Lange. So Andrew Lange was a collector of fairy tales as well, but he was much later than Perrault and Dulnoy. He published his first collection in 1889 and ultimately put out a total of 12 collections, the last one coming out in 1913. His wife, Leonora Blanche Aline, helped and translated many of the stories into English. So these were stories that were already written down. Like Perrault's stories, for example, appear in the fairy books. So these were not stories that were collected from the oral tradition, but there are tons and tons of them. Each book has a different color. So there's, like, the blue Fairy book, the red fairy book, etc. And. And they are now considered to be one of the best and most exhaustive collections of fairy tales that we have. So that's kind of A brief, as I say, very, very brief overview of where fairy tales come from, what they are and how we know about them now in the modern day. But there's one other very important thing that I want to mention about fairy tales, because this is going to form the basis for a lot of our conversations this summer. And I was alluding to it at the top of the episode, but we've gotten to it now, and that is that fairy tales are actually allegories, okay? So what I mean by that is they have symbolic meaning that exists underneath the literal story that's being told. And the symbolic meaning points to a universal truth about life. Okay? We know this instinctively. Like we understand, for example, that Little Red Riding Hood is a story about not straying from the path, not talking to strangers and things like that. It's not only a story about a little girl whose grandmother gets eaten by a wolf, okay? But it's actually more than that too. The wolf. Just to keep going with the Little Red Riding Hood example, the wolf actually represents bad people, or more specifically, bad men who might lure you astray, perhaps even sexually, or try to entice you to come with them and then harm you. And even the woods itself has symbolic meaning. In fact, pretty much all the elements that you associate with fairy tales, like fairy godmothers, witches, wishing wells, poisoned apples, magic mirrors, princes, princesses, wicked stepmothers, all of it, all these elements are not only what they actually are, they're also symbols that represent various important aspects of life, okay? Often they represent important moments in a child's life, like the transition from child to adult or burgeoning romantic interest, or your true self versus how other people see you or whatever it might be. And I know that you might be thinking like, oh, come on, that is not in there. And even if it were in there, are we really supposed to expect little children to interpret these various symbolic elements and figure out what these stories are really telling them? And my answer to that is kind of yes, not overtly like that. Like little kids wouldn't be sitting there saying, ah, yes, the wolf is a man and he's warning me not to be sexually active. But they would get the gist. They'd understand that this was a story teaching them to be careful of strange people and to follow their parents rules and everything like that. One of the problems with reading fairy tales in the modern day is that we've forgotten that fairy tales hold symbolic meaning. We've forgotten that they're allegories, these stories that illustrate universal truth. We think they're meant to be taken literally. That's where you get criticisms like that Cinderella is a kind of passive drip, just waiting around for a man to rescue her. Cinderella is about so much more than that. You just have to understand the symbolism of these stories. So one of the things that we're going to be talking a lot about this summer is that underlying symb because that's actually what makes these stories so powerful and it's what makes them relevant to more modern stories. In classic books, the symbolism inherent in these stories becomes the symbolism inherent in stories that use these fairy tales as building blocks. And if you aren't aware of this symbolism or even that there is symbolism, a lot of things become very confusing very fast. Okay, so next week we're going to actually read several fairy tales and we're going to start diving into this discussion of what these stories actually mean as opposed to what they seem to mean on the surface. And we're going to really dig into that. But I'm going to stop for today because that is a topic for another time. It's a topic for next week. So I would love to hear your thoughts about what you've learned today. I would love questions. If you have things you want to follow up on or things that I I said that maybe weren't clear, just go to my website, faithkmore.com and click on Contact or scroll into the Show Notes. You'll find all kinds of interesting links there. Click them all. But also there's the link to my contact page as well. And we'll come back next week ready to talk more about this and then to read some stories together. I hope that you will join us. Thank you so much for listening. Storytime will return in September with a new book read aloud in twice weekly episodes with a few notes along the way, like an audiobook with built in notes. The new book will be revealed sometime in August. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Is there anything you'd like me to clarify? Did something particularly interest you? Please go to my website, faithkmoore.com, click on Contact and send me your questions and thoughts. Or you can click on the link in the Show Notes to contact me. I'll feature some of your thoughts as we go along. Speaking of links, please check out the other links in the Show Notes. You can learn more about me, pick up Storytime Merch, or become a member of our online community. Before I go, I'd like to ask a quick favor. This is an independent podcast. It's produced, recorded and marketed by me. So I need your help. Spread the word about the show by posting about it on social media or texting a link to your friends. Subscribe, tap those five stars and leave a positive review wherever you're listening. If you are able to support the show financially, there's a link in the show notes to make a donation. I would really, really appreciate it. Alright everyone, class is dismissed. I'll see you next week.