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- [00:00]
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 cozy chair and settle in. Class is in session. Welcome to Summer Session. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad you're here and I'm so excited to start this with you. If you're just finding this show for the very first time, this Storytime for Grown Ups, welcome. I'm so glad you found us. This is normally a show where we read classic books a few chapters at a time, pausing here and there for a few notes along the way. But during the summer we do something a little different. It's called Summer Session and what it is is kind of like a college class, only fun. It's where we take the summer to dive deeply into a topic that hopefully will help us to further understand the books and the stories that we read during the rest of the year. So this summer, I am very excited to say, we are looking at fairy tales. We are going to be talking about fairy tales all summer long, starting today all the way through until the end of August. And then of course in September, we will start up again with Story Time and come back with a new book that I have not yet revealed yet because I'm dastardly like that. But I will reveal it to you at some point. Usually I reveal it in August, so. So make sure that you are subscribed so you don't miss that. And also so that you get all of these Summer Session episodes in your podcast feed and you don't miss anything. These episodes are going to be weekly. They will drop as this one has on Mondays. There will not be Thursday episodes during the summer, but of course Thursday episodes will come back in the fall with twice a week episodes with our new book. But here we are starting the summer out together. And as I say, we're going to be talking about fairy tales this summer as a way to further understand stories more broadly. Fairy tales are one of it's not the only, but they are one of the most important building blocks of Western literature. Understanding fairy tales and kind of how they work, the tropes that are involved in them, the misconceptions that we might have about them, understanding all of that will help you to recognize these themes and ideas in all kinds of books, modern books, books that we don't read on here because they're not classics. And classic books, it's everywhere. And so I hope that by the end of the summer, you will have, hopefully, a deeper understanding of story and how stories work, and that will stand you in good stead for picking up new books on your own. You know, of course, one of the goals of this podcast is that you will now be able to go away and read classic books on your own that maybe felt too difficult or confusing before. That you kind of build a lexicon and a historical understanding and all of these things that you can take with you to other books. Of course, I hope you'll stick around and listen to the books we read as well. But I want to give you these tools. And fairy tales, believe it or not, are one of these tools that are going to help you to understand books more fully and more deeply. And so hopefully that is what is going to happen by the end of this summer. And we're going to do this in a variety of ways. One of the things that we're going to do, of course, is read many, many of the fairy tales that we think we know. But unless we've read them in the original, we actually might not know as well as we think we do. So we're going to do lots of reading this summer. I'm going to have some wonderful guests on the show. In fact, you may have noticed that today's episode includes a guest. So there will be guests, we'll do interviews with them, and I will also talk about these stories within the context of what they mean for literature in general. So some of the episodes will be just me talking to you. Some of the episodes will be me reading to you, and some will be me talking to other people to get other perspectives and other knowledge that I might not have myself. So that's how it's going to go this summer. And as always, I want to hear from you. So at the end of each episode, whatever comes up for you, if you have questions, if it made you think of something interesting, if you just want to comment on something that you heard, please do write in and I will continue featuring one or two of your letters at the start of each episode to help us kind of keep this conversation going and to help us dive into whatever we're going to be talking about that day. So the way to get in touch with me is, as always, faithkmoore.com and then click on Contact. There's also a link in the Show Notes to that Contact page and you can find me there and write to me. And as always, your questions and comments will help this show to be what it is. It is nothing without you. Even in the summertime, maybe even especially in the summertime. This is a conversation between all of us and so I hope you will join in other ways to join in the conversation. We still have our online community, which is called the Drawing Room, which is short for withdrawing room in an old Victorian House, which is how I imagine this podcast. Perhaps I'm delusional, but I imagine that we are all together in a house party in an old Victorian manor house. And when we people gathered together in an old Victorian manor house after dinner, they would all withdraw to the drawing room where they would play games, talk, discuss books, talk about life, all of those things. And we have that place. It's a virtual drawing room, but we really do have it and there really are people there. Friends are waiting for you in the Storytime for Grown Ups drawing room and basically all you need to do to get there and withdraw with us after each episode is scroll into the Show Notes, click on the link that's there, and you'll see what options there are for joining. There are various membership options. The Landed Gentry option gets you access to our Tea Times, which are monthly voice chats with me and other Storytime listeners. We just had one recently. It was really, really fun and I hope you were there. Or if you missed it, I hope you'll join us for the next one. But if you don't want to do that, you can also be just a house guest, which is also a fantastic way to be part of the community because that gets you access to the Basically it's like a chat room. You type to each other and as I say, it's very active in there. There's people in there all the time. Whenever I check in, there are new messages. So if you'd like to be a part of that, that is still going on over the summer and Tea Times will continue to happen over the summer as well. And I will let you know when I schedule the one for June, because that will be coming up in a few weeks. Okay. So as I say, today's episode is going to be an interview and I'm really excited about it. I cannot wait to share it with you. Before I do, though, I want to share a few of your letters. You know, when I posted the trailer for Summer Session and I announced that we were going to be talking all about fairy tales all summer long, I confess that I was a little nervous. I wasn't sure how people were going to react. I thought, oh, maybe people will think fairy tales are for kids. Why would I want to listen to this? Which is actually partly what we're going to talk about in the interview today. But you guys didn't say that at all. And in fact I got an overwhelmingly positive response. I don't think anybody wrote in to say they were disappointed. And I got a lot of emails saying how excited people were. So I just want to read a few of those to let you know how your fellow Story Time for Grownups listeners are feeling at the start of Summer session, because I think that's always a great way to start. So I'm going to read a few reactions to Summer Session to the topic of fairy tales, and then I will introduce our guest. So the first letter I want to read comes from Aaron Hynek. Aaron writes, just heard the summer term subject and I am so excited. I love thinking about how stories bind us together as humans, how they speak to our differences. I find it interesting that usually the best stories are retellings of a few basic ideas. Some wise guy once said, there's nothing new under the sun. The next one is from Danielle Costa. Danielle writes, I couldn't be more excited. I love fairy tales, but not in a Disney sort of way. I love the way that both Tolkien wrote about it and C.S. lewis described them. Lewis saw the fairy tale as more real than real stories. As a child, I was fascinated by them. I read them to my children as they were growing up and I still read them today. I am 62 years old as Lewis said that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The next one is from Megan Pack. Megan writes, ah, fairy tales. What a great idea for a summer session. I'm so excited. I think it will be fascinating. I'm so glad too that we'll be still reading a little. I loved when you read Beauty and the Beast. So she's talking about last summer. I did read the original Beauty and the Beast or one of the original tellings of Beauty and the Beast because we were talking about Jane Eyre and its connection to that fairy tale, which is another example of how fairy tales relate to all these stories. So she's saying she really enjoyed that reading. So I'm glad the next one comes from Kate. Kate says, ha. Had to reply immediately. I just listened to the trailer. My children were so confused as I yelled across the room to my husband. And it's fairy tales. No one ever talks about fairy tales, and they are my favorite. So, anyway, once again, I love this podcast. The next one's from Meredith. Meredith says, this is so exciting because my three boys and I have recently decided to have a fairy tale summer, so we will be reading many as a family this year.
- [10:44]
Bose Harrington
Okay.
- [10:44]
Faith Moore
I love the idea of a fairy tale summer. We are having a fairy tale summer right now. I declare it. It is fairy tale summer, people. All right, and this last one is from Karen May. Karen writes, I was driving when the trailer dropped, and can I say, the way I cried? Yes. And pumped my arms like a middle school boy slam dunking a basketball was unparalleled. I've been dreading the end of the Woman in White, but now I can let it wrap up easily, knowing my summer has so much magic in store. Seriously, thank you so much for reawakening my love for literature. Okay. Your emails make me so happy. There were lots more, but these are the ones that I chose to read because they just give you a feel for the energy that's out there right now. And I feel it and I hope that you do too. Please keep writing to me because you make my day whenever you do. Okay, so today, as an introduction to summer session, an introduction to this topic of fairy tales, I wanted to have a discussion with someone. I wanted to have a guest on so that we could talk about just the importance of these stories. Why should we talk about fairy tales? As I said, you know, sometimes people write to me and say, fairy tales are for children. Why do you. Sometimes I, you know, I post about it on X, for example, and they'll say, why do you post about this? These are for kids. And so I wanted to have a conversation to start with so that we could establish that these stories actually really are important. I wanted to talk about what they are. I wanted to talk about why we should care. And I wanted to just kind of use that as a springboard for us as we go into the summer. And there was really only one person that I thought of when I thought, who should I have on to have this conversation? With me. I wasn't sure if he was going to say yes, but he did. I'm very pleased and happy that he said yes because this is the person that I really, really wanted to have this conversation with. His name is Bose Harrington. If you are on X, you might know him as Bose the Library Owl or Owl at the Library. His handle is sketchesbybowes. And if you are on X and you are not following him, what are you? Your time on X, you absolutely should be following him. This is how I found him. He is my absolute favorite social media follow. And the reason he's my favorite is because he posts about myths and fairy tales and why they matter in such a delightful and informative way. It's like a vibe, you guys. You know, I like to think of this podcast as having the vibe of a kind of Victorian manor house where, where a house party is going on. Well, Bose's posts are like the most magical, whimsical fairy tale vibe that you can get anywhere on the Internet. And that is where I found him. And he has very large following on there. But he's also a writer of mystery novels and he has a blog about myths and fairy tales which is on Substack. And if you scroll into the show notes of this episode, there are links both to his page on X and also to his blog on Substack Stack. He lives in Oregon with his lovely wife, who's also very excited about great literature. And he's just a wonderful person and we had a fantastic conversation. So I'm going to let Bose and I kind of kick us off for the summer with this conversation about why we should even care about fairy tales. So don't forget to write to Me, faith k.moore.com Click on Contact or scroll into the show notes. Don't forget to check out all the other links in the show notes and maybe check out sign up for the online community. The drawing room. You can find our tip jar there. You can find our merchandise there. There's lots of things to look at. So take a look at those links and then we'll be back next week on Monday with more in our discussion of fairy tales. But here is our interview with Bose Harrington. Hi Bose. Welcome to Storytime for Grown Ups. Thanks so much for being here.
- [14:51]
Bose Harrington
Thank you, Faith.
- [14:53]
Faith Moore
So I want to start really broad. This is kind of going to be like our intro to our summer topic. So can you just define fairy tales for me? What is a fairy tale? What makes a fairy tale a fairy tale?
- [15:05]
Bose Harrington
So recently I was reading Tom Shippy's book the Road to Middle Earth, how Sarah Tolkien created new mythology. And he was talking about the difference between mythology, legends, sagas and fairy tales, and which is something that particularly interested Tolkien. And he said, you know, you have these, you have like BEOWULF in the 900s, this story about a man killing Grendel, and the Icelandic sagas, and these were stories for aristocrats. They were written for the wealthy to tell each other around the fire in winter. But then you have the stories of the peasants. Folktales. Folktales and fairy tales. And these are stories that were shared by common folk who oftentimes could not read or write. And what I find interesting about these stories is that because they were passed down over, say, Hundreds of years, three, four, 500 years, sometimes thousands of years. Cinderella goes back 5,000 years. Well, the stories, as they were told over time, they kept changing and were refined. And Ross Douthat mentions in one of his recent essays that what this means is you eventually get the best possible version of this story. And he says it's very hard for someone today to just sit down and write a modern fairy tale because they don't have that 5,000 year process of a story being honed and refined. And so Douthat says, if you want to write a really good story, and this is something that Lewis and Tolkien also said, he said, if you want to write a really good story, you have to borrow from the fairy tales and the folktales of the past.
- [17:04]
Faith Moore
Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so what I'm hearing is that a fairy tale is a kind of, almost like a sort of conglomeration of stories that have been passed down for centuries and centuries and told and retold in an oral kind of tradition and that come to us now through all of that time, which is so cool and amazing. And are there elements of story that define a fairy tale? Because, I mean, I think that there are stories that do that that kind of aren't fairy tales, for example. They're myths or, you know, they're, they're religious stories or something like that. So are there elements that make a fairy tale a fairy tale? Or is it kind of hard to define what, what exactly it is?
- [17:52]
Bose Harrington
I kind of lumped them all together when I'm talking casually. Myths, fairy tales, I think they're all important. Yeah, but as for fairy tales, there, there do tend to be, but are not always magical elements. They typically involve a character who is an everyman. For instance, the story of Jack the Giant Killer. He's a very ordinary Person who happens to be quite clever.
- [18:21]
Faith Moore
The.
- [18:21]
Bose Harrington
The protagonist is often a very clever person who survives by his wits. You know, in the myths, like King Arthur, you sometimes see someone being chosen or having a particular destiny about them. But the folk tales don't have that so much. They have someone who chooses to be in the story because they want to be, because there is something happening that needs to be addressed. There is a trauma that needs to be avenged. There is a giant that needs be killed. So. But they. They typically have certain motifs. This is really interesting. There is a book called the Stith Thompson Motif index, and it's 2400 pages, and it's just a list of, like a hundred thousand folk tale motifs that someone collected in the 1950s. And it's got all the motifs in all the fairy tales that have ever been collected by fol. Folklorists.
- [19:25]
Faith Moore
That's amazing. So it's amazing that there's that many. And also that. That. But also that you can collect them, right? That there is this kind of sense of what. What these stories entail. And so I like. I like that distinction that you're making about a sort of every man being thrust into a scenario, but having the wits to kind of take care of business and get things done, as opposed to, I'm King Arthur. I've been chosen to go off and, you know, do whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing. So, okay, so these are stories that are passed down, but they, at some point were kind of collected, written down. Now we have these giant tomes that tell us all their motifs and things like that. But. But I often, when I talk about fairy tales, which I do from time to time when I talk about fairy tales, I always get at least one person pushing back and saying, these stories are children's stories. Why are you talking about these? What?
- [20:23]
Bose Harrington
What?
- [20:23]
Faith Moore
Who cares? Who cares about these? These are bedtime stories that we tell to children. And so I'm wondering, is that true? Are they stories for children? And is there any point in adults talking about them if they are? So I guess that's two questions. But are they for children? And what's the point of talking about them?
- [20:45]
Bose Harrington
This is, as you probably know, one of my pet peeves, because every day I go on Twitter and I post about fairy tales and folktales and myths, and I've always got someone saying, shouldn't be reading those. You're an adult. And it drives me insane. And the first thing I say to that is, if you actually read some of these stories, many of Them are not for children. The. The Grimm Brothers story of the Juniper Tree, sort of the classic example is about a stepmother who chops up her stepson and boils him in a stew and tries to feed him to her family. And then his bones are buried under in the backyard, and a juniper tree grows up and his bones are the leaves and the branches, and they sing of how she murdered him and put him in the stew. And, I mean, German children in the 19th century were a different breed. They, you know, they love stuff like that. But we typically don't tell our children stories like that today. Maybe we should. The children actually seem to like stories like that. The parents tend to not want to tell their children stories like that. But the, the other thing I would say is Lewis and Tolkien were addressing the same issue in the 1930s and 40s because they were digging up old myths and sagas and fairy tales, and they also kind of used the term loosely. And people were coming up to Professor Tolkien and Professor Lewis and saying, you shouldn't be reading this kid's nonsense. And, and Tolkien actually wrote several essays and gave several lectures on this topic. And he said, this is not nonsense. These stories are our common heritage. They tell us things because we. We are in soul beings. We are not a mere mechanical dance of atoms. As CS Lewis said, we need spiritual nourishment. We need enchantment. And we have been living, as Lewis said, under the spell of modernism for the last hundred years. And we need to break the spell of modernism that says that the material world is all that matters. And fairy tales tell us there's something more. They tell us about the nature of good and evil. They tell us about human beings, about myth, about the journey of life through a spiritual lens and a psychological lens. And we desperately need that in our day when that sort of thinking, the spiritual, the enchanted world, is under attack.
- [23:25]
Faith Moore
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I completely agree with you. And I think also, I mean, this is sort of what you're saying, but they, they form the kind of bedrock of, of narrative. And, and if you don't know. Yeah. And if you don't know where these, what these stories are or where they come from, then you're kind of lost when it comes to any kind of story moving forward. And as you say, I think the secret that we don't know as modern people who grew up on, like, Disney or whatever, we don't know that there's a lot of dark stuff going on in these stories and that. That's part of what makes them so amazing. And it's part of what we need as humans, right, to. We need to address that darkness, and we need to sort of come to terms with it, comes to grips with it. And that's how we can. Through that, through the fantasy, as you were talking about. So, you know, what. What would you say? What place do fairy tales hold in helping us to understand kind of story more broadly? Or, you know, you and I are both, in our own ways, kind of engaged in the task of helping people to kind of revive the classics. Right. The literature of the past. We both. Both. Right. We both believe that this is important and that we can't let those things fall by the wayside. So what would you say is the place of fairy tales in kind of understanding story more broadly?
- [24:54]
Bose Harrington
I just wrote an essay about this on Sunday. I. I would say that there is not any modern literature without the myths and fairy tales of the past, or any pop culture for that matter. You look at someone like Dickens, and there are whole books about how he drew his plots from the fairy tales he was told in the nursery by his nurse, who told him terrifying stories. And his reading of the Arabian Nights, which was a collection of Middle Eastern folktales from the 12th through 14th centuries. And I love it. It's amazing. But Dickens drew his knowledge of how to write and how to tell stories from reading, for example, the Arabian Nights. And same with CS Lewis. He. He did not love the Arabian Nights, but he was heavily influenced by it. And Tolkien, sort of the classic modern example of someone who drew from stories of the past to write something that looks original, but isn't he. He. In his teens, he was reading the Icelandic sagas in the original language because he was Tolkien. And, you know, if you. You examine Lord of the Rings very closely, it's kind of a pastiche of Beowulf and the sagas and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, another great story. And Lewis. Lewis just threw a million stories into a pot, and Narnia is what came out. And it's amazing. It's just a mess of stories, including, you know, the Arabian Nights, the. The Fairy Queen, Romance of the Rose, a bit of the Divine Comedy. He. Everything that appealed to Lewis, he just said, I'm gonna write about that, and I'm gonna make it for kids. I'm gonna make it accessible for kids. And now you have kids growing up reading the Chronicles of Narnia, and they're going, oh, I want to know what influenced Lewis. And they end up going to college and deciding they want to study the Fairy Queen. They want to read the Divine Comedy and they've. What they loved in Lewis, they end up finding a bit of. In those stories. And so, you know, it perpetuates itself because then people continue to discover the classics. But also you look at are, you know, TV writers and movie writers, and they are always drawing from this stuff, or at least they have been until recently. I think some of our. The last 10 years there's been a bit of a decline in the drawing from old stories. And you can, you can tell that's unfortunate. But if you want to write good stories and if you want to write good movies, you have to go back to the classics. You have to go back to like the 12 dancing princesses and. Or the Juniper Tree and, And those. Well, well, the Twelve Dancing Princesses is. Was a major influence for Susanna Clarke in her novel the Jonathan Strange. And Mr. Norrell.
- [28:06]
Faith Moore
Yes.
- [28:07]
Bose Harrington
Which, if you've read Strange and Oral, it's about a woman who is abducted and taken every night to dance at a fairy ball, which. It sounds fun, but it's utterly terrifying.
- [28:18]
Faith Moore
She makes it so frightening, so creepy.
- [28:22]
Bose Harrington
But she was drawing on the Grimm Brothers tale which they collected from the German peasants, the 12 dancing princesses, where these 12 princesses have to dance every night in an underground room and no one knows where they're going, but they disappear every night and it turns out they're going through this long tunnel into this room and they cannot stop dancing. They try to stop dancing and they can't. And just, you know, my tip for aspiring writers, aspiring screenwriters, I think the only thing you really have to do is be intimately acquainted with stories. And even if you're not an aspiring writer or screenwriter, I think it's still important for you to be acquainted with these stories because as you get older, you realize they have immense wisdom for us in, in raising families, in getting older, in knowing how to live rightly. There is so much wisdom embedded and encoded in these stories. So it's. It's important, I think, for all of us to read them. And I think there has been, especially in the uk, there has been more of a revival of interest in folklore in the last few years, less so in America. But I am hopeful because so many of us grew up reading Chesterton, McDonald Lewis and Tolkien, and they emphasized this so much. I think that ultimately their influence and the success of movies like Lord of the Rings will bring about a resurgence of interest in this.
- [30:03]
Faith Moore
Yeah, I think that's right. And I'm glad that you talked about aspiring writers aspiring film writers, because I know we have a lot of those in our listenership, and I think that's a huge thing is knowing what these stories are. And I always say to people, you know, you can break the rules, but you first have to know what they are. And I think if we don't know what these stories are and how they work and why they work and what they're telling us, we can't, we can't tell stories. We don't know what we're doing. We're just sort of, of stumbling around in the dark. But I guess speaking to that sort of sense of modern storytelling and the, the what we owe to the fairy tales, do you think that there is such a thing as a modern fairy tale? Do fairy tales have to be old? Or could someone today sit down and write a brand new fairy tale? Is that possible? Or are these are. Do these stories have to be from the past?
- [31:00]
Bose Harrington
I would say what is more likely to happen is that you have something like Harry Potter. When it came out, it was, it was new to many people, but it has the shape of a fairy tale. But if you look closely at it, it's kind of like a gemstone or a geode. You examine it and you realize it's, it's refracting a lot of these older stories that J.K. rowling was familiar with. I think that is the more common route, is that you write an old, or write a new version of an old story. She took, you know, King Arthur and a bit of Roald Dahl, a bit of Dickens and a bit of Agatha Christie, and she made them into something new. And I think that's the way to go. Now I think you have kind of a mashup, a blending of genres, as she did with the boarding school genre, the mystery genre, the, the fairy fantasy genre. As for self consciously sitting down and saying, I'm going to write, you know, a new motif, a completely new story, I don't know if you can, and I don't know if that would be wise. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity. He says, there is nothing original. There are no new, original stories. And if you try to write an original story, your story is going to be, frankly, terrible. That's what he says. But he says the, the best writers have always been the ones who have not bothered with originality, who have simply repurposed the older tales. And if you look at writers of the Middle Ages, originality wasn't really something that they thought was desirable. And so they were always scripting from each other. Boccaccio the Italian writer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, especially if you look at his stories, they are all borrowed from older sources. He was drawing from the chronicles of the English historians and King Lear was based on a folk tale. Hamlet was based on a Scandinavian revenge saga. And you know, some people have accused him of plagiarizing. But I think we have a very narrow definition of idea theft today, which I don't think benefits anyone. I think you have to steal stories in a way if you, you want to get anywhere, if you want to be successful, if you want your work to appeal to anyone. Does that make sense?
- [33:41]
Faith Moore
Yeah, it makes total sense. And I think, you know, the fact that, that fairy tales and myths and folklore come down to us through the ages. Right. Like it seems to me that it would then be impossible to kind of sit down and write a completely new one. Right. That hadn't ever been thought of somehow before. So in terms of, you know, since we on this podcast are going to spend our whole summer sort of talking about fairy tales and reading fairy tales and, and you, I think are the person that I know more than anyone else that's probably read them all. Do you have recommendations for people? Let's say someone has kind of never really read the fairy tales like they know what they are but you know, they, they weren't read them as children. They've kind of written them off now they're ready to, to get into them. I'm, you know, they're an adult. Where should they go to read the fairy tales? What, what books do you recommend? And, and where, where should they look?
- [34:40]
Bose Harrington
I have so many recommendations. I love our recommending books. So first of all, you want to read kind of the, the pinnacle of the, the genre, Andrew Lang's 12 Colored Fairy Books from the 1880s and 1890s. He it's so comprehensive, it's hard to think of a well known story or even an obscure story that he left out. These books, they're gorgeous, they're gorgeously illustrated and he got everything, they're great. The, it's the blue book is I think the first one and there's the red book and the orange book and the brown book. But read Andrew Lang's colored fairy books and then I always say you have to read the Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights, which typically comes in three or four volumes if you've got a good collection. Sometimes there's a one volume collection, but avoid those. Read, read as much of it as you can. It's phenomenal. It's so Strange. And you have. If you've only seen, like, the screen adaptations, you haven't gotten the full feel of it. You. Some of the weirder stories are the ones that are lesser known. And you find yourself completely engrossed, going, what on earth is happening? There's. There's a man in one of the stories who meets 11 guys who all have one eye. And it's. And he. He goes, what's happening? And they tell him, if you want to find out why we only have one eye, you have to go wrap yourself in sheepskin and sit on the parapet of the nearest castle. And so he wraps himself in sheepskin and sits on the parapet of the nearest castle and waits. And at sunset, a giant bird, the rock, comes and lifts him up and carries him away and takes him to the Castle of Brass and where he's met by a bunch of ladies. And the ladies tell him, you can do anything you want. There are 4:40 doors in this castle, and you can open all but one of them. But this one door you must not ever open. And so he hangs out in the Castle of brass for 40 days, and he thinks, this is great. But then he gets bored. He's opened every door. Of course, you know, there's always the prohibition that is typically broken. And he opens the 40th door, and mist and smoke comes out, and he can't see, and he's so confused. And then there is a horse, and the horse's wing blinds him. It pokes him in the eye and blinds him. And then the horse carries him back to the other castle where the 11 men are waiting. And he has to join the 11 men, clearly. And he becomes. He becomes the 12th man who's missing an eye. And the next person that comes, he's with them. When they say, you know, don't ask, but if you want to find out. So stories like that, you know, that you're. You're never told, but they are completely insane and wonderful, and our lives are enriched by having heard them. So Andrew Lang, the Arabian Nights. There's a book called the, I think, Chinese Fairy Book that was written in 1911, compiled by Richard Wilhelm, it's phenomenal. Briggs Encyclopedia of Fairies. Obviously, the Grimm brothers, they have some of the. The best stories. Godfather, Death is one that they told where a man goes inside a mountain and death is there. And death has a million candles. And the candles are all representing a person's life. And every time one of the candles burns out, that's a person's life is over. So, Godfather, Death The Icelandic Sagas. Joseph Jacobs wrote several collections that I think are definitive. They're really good. I love reading them. There's English Fairy Tales and more. English Fairy Tales and Celtic Fairy Tales and more Celtic Fairy Tales. And some of our most famous stories were collected for the first time or have their most popular versions in those collections by Joseph Jacobs. Love, Katie O'Hearn. He collected Chinese stories. There's one book that I really love. It's by, I think, Pooh Song Ling. It's called Strange Stories From a Chinese studio. It's in 12 volumes, and I haven't read all 12 volumes, but. But I'm working on it. And there's a Penguin Classics edition that's just one volume, and I think that's probably sufficient. But Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio, as advertised, they are incredibly strange. The Norse Myths. I think the best version of the Norse myths is Kevin Crossley Holland's Norse Myths. It's phenomenal. He's such a good storyteller, and he gets all the good ones. The Welsh Fairy Book Yates, William Butler Yates has a great collection of Irish tales. And I think probably my single favorite fairy tale collection that's not the Arabian Nights is Peter Beresford Ellis's 2004 collection, Celtic Myths and Legends. It's phenomenal. It's got fairy tales from six different areas of Britain and Breton and Scotland and Wales. And they are so strange, so weird, and in some cases, so disturbed. Celtic Myths and Legends by Peter Ellis. Phenomenal. I love it. Can't say enough about it.
- [40:43]
Faith Moore
Fantastic. Those are excellent recommendations. I feel like people are set. Their summer reading list is now. That's it. Go away. Read all of those books, everybody. So my last question for you really is about your. I mean, you've just told us. First of all, you've just told us some amazing fears. I feel like. I love. It's like he opens the door. You know, there's always the door you can't open, right? And then it goes in there, and it's like a horse that plucks out his eye. Like, that's so random. But I love it because it's like, you're such an idiot. Like, don't open the door. Like, you know, they told you, if you want to know why we only have one eye, like, go over there. And then, you know, you open the door. But they always open the door. It's great. I love those stories. So, okay, so you've told us several, but I'm wondering, of all the fairy tales, what is your very favorite. And I think you, you've actually brought it with us. So tell us, tell us what your favorite fairy tale is.
- [41:34]
Bose Harrington
Yes, my favorite fairy tale of all time is one that is called Cherry of Xenor in most collections, although Peter Ellis in his collection calls it the the Buckus. But I read this for the first time in 2004. It was right before I started college and I when I finished it I went this is the weirdest thing I've ever read and it is probably still the weirdest thing I've ever read. And I'm going to read the version that is written down in Catherine Briggs book An Encyclopedia of Fairies and Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogeys and Other Supernatural Creatures, which is an indispensable reference on the fairies. It's phenomenal. So Cherry of Xenor. Cherry was one of a large family living in Xenor, a small village in Cornwall. When she got to the age of 14 it was time for her to go out into the world. She set out to be hired at the local fair, but her courage failed her and on the Lady Downs she sat down and cried. Whilst she was still weeping a handsome well dressed gentleman stood beside her and asked what was troubling her. After some conversation he said that he was going out to hire a neat tidy girl to look after his little son because he had recently been left a widower. He praised Cherry's neatly mended clothes and tidy looks and hired her to go along with him. They went an immense way down and down twisting lanes with high hedges closing above them. The gentlemen lifted Cherry over several streams and at length they came to a gate and to a garden. Garden where flowers of all seasons grew. Cherry thought she had never seen so lovely a place. A little sharp eyed boy ran out to greet them, followed by an old cross looking woman. That's my wife's mother, said the gentleman. But she will only stay a few days to put you in the ways of the place and then she shall go. The old woman looked crossly at Cherry, muttering that she knew Robin would choose a fool. It was a strange place with long passages and a big room with locked up into which the old woman led Cherry. It was full of what Cherry thought of as dead people, presumably statues. And there was a coffin like box in the middle of the room which Cherry was set to polish. When she rubbed it hard it made a strange groaning sound and Cherry fell down in a faint. Her master ran in, picked her up and took her out, kissed and comforted her and sent the Old woman away. Cherry's duties were very light and pleasant. She had to play with the boy, milk a cow who appeared mysteriously when she was called, and anoint the boy's eyes every morning with green ointment. The pleasantest of her duties was to help her master walk in the garden. At the end of every row he gave Cherry a kiss and she would have been quite happy if it had not been that her master disappeared for many hours together and when he came back, went into the locked room from which strange sounds proceeded. Her little charge would answer none of her questions, but only said, I'll tell Granny if she asked him anything. But she fancied that he saw much more than she did and his eyes were very bright. So one morning she sent him off to pick some flowers and slyly put a crumb of the ointment into her own eye. This produced a transformation. The garden was swarming with creatures. Her eyes smarted and she ran to the well to wash out the ointment. At the bottom of the well she saw numbers of people dancing and to her fury, she saw her master among them and on very familiar terms with the little people. Soon she saw her master coming back to his normal size. He went up to the locked room and went inside. Cherry followed him and peeped through the keyhole. He lifted the lid of the coffin and a lady came out, sat down and began to play upon the coffin. And all the statues began to dance. Cherry ran away weeping when her master called her to weed the garden with him. She was very sulky. At the end of the first row, he tried to kiss her, but she pushed him away, saying, go and kiss your little people. At the bottom of the well, her master looked very sad. Cherry, you have been using the ointment that you were told not to use. I'm sorry, but you must go home. And old Grace must come back again. Cherry cried, and besought. But he made her pack her clothes and led her back by the long uphill way onto the Lady Downs. She never saw him again. And like many people who have visited fairyland, she did no good in the mortal world but hung about the Lady Downs helping Robin, her master, hoping he would come back and see her. This is one occasion on which the seeing eye was not blinded. Cherry's master had shown great restraint.
- [46:08]
Faith Moore
Oh, boy. I've never heard that one before. And there are. What I love is that there are so many elements in it of the stories that we've already talked about today. Like there are so many things that are in that story that, you know, we, as you say, motifs, right, that, that we've talked about.
- [46:25]
Bose Harrington
Right.
- [46:25]
Faith Moore
The forbidden, the forbidden door. The, the little person who isn't anything special but shows up in this. I mean, there. It was all in there almost. So that was great. I loved it. And thank you, thank you for the, for the reading. This is story time, so I'm happy that we got to have some story time. Thank you for that. So this has been fantastic. This is an amazing, wonderful introduction to fairy tales. Thank you for being here. So if people want to find you and find out more about you, where should they go?
- [46:54]
Bose Harrington
Twitter. I'm on Twitter as Boaz, the library owl, etchesbybose and I am constantly ranting about fairy tales. I apologize in advance, but I'm very passionate on this subject. So if you want to learn more about myths and sagas and so forth, you can find me there. Good.
- [47:11]
Faith Moore
And I will put a link in the Show Notes and yeah, you are my absolute favorite follow. You're the best, the best Twitter account. You're my favorite follow. So everyone should follow you on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it now. So that's where you can be found. And I will put a link in the Show Notes so that people can find it very quickly and easily. So thank you. Thank you for coming on the show and talking to us about fairy tales today. Thank you so much for listening. Story Time 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. Sa.