Just fairy tales

I recently came across a quotation from the late children’s author Rosemary Sutcliff which caught my attention, because it expressed what I think is a profound truth about traditional stories, as well as turning a common misconception on its head:

The young have a strong feeling for the primitive and fundamental things of life. That is why myths and legends certainly not meant for children in the first place have been largely taken over by them.

The profound truth is that fairy tales are about ‘the primitive and fundamental things of life’. The misconception is that fairy tales have been turned over to children by adults; what Sutcliff appears to be saying here is that, on the contrary, children have held on to fairy tales because they are the last group of people in our society to understand their importance. I like this interpretation, which seems to offer children more agency than they are normally credited with. Children are the custodians of fairy tales rather than just their last consumers.

It is always a source of amusement to me when people seek to disparage the beliefs of others (usually religious beliefs) by calling them ‘fairy tales’ (sometimes even ‘Bronze Age fairy tales’…), as if the idea of a fairy tale carries some sort of automatically pejorative connotations we are all supposed to nod at and understand. For after all we, the community of grown-ups, have a tacit understanding that certain things are childish. I must confess that I loathe this sort of thinking. It is a cliché that childhood was an invention of the Victorians, and of course it is not entirely true – St Paul himself spoke about putting away childish things – but there is some truth in the idea that childishness and ‘grown-upness’ as accepted denominators of cultural value are a rather recent phenomenon. The easiest way to see this is to look at the pedagogical literature of the 17th century, where children’s alphabet books were as likely to feature gruesome martyrdoms as animals – and until the 19th century (and, in many respects, the 20th), children tended to be steered towards books more likely to appeal to a child’s imagination rather than books written specifically for children.

As a child, I remember being rather revolted by Dickens’ Life of Our Lord (one of the earliest books written specifically for children) while devouring Gulliver’s Travels, the unexpurgated Arabian Nights, Aesop’s Fables, and Pilgrim’s Progress – four books which were historically recommended for children, but certainly weren’t written for them. I am reminded of the way in which even babies always seem to know the difference between a real set of car keys (worthy of endless fiddling) and the fake plastic set in which they show no interest whatsoever. Children have an uncanny ability to detect the real. This is not to say that there are not many great books written specifically for children – and I read and loved many of them – but I think the reason I was drawn to fairy tales was that they were real; more real than anything, somehow. Hence my amusement at those who use them as a placeholder for the unreal and the false.

But what makes fairy tales so real? Not only were they not written for children; they were, usually, not written by one specific person (even if they are often transmitted to us from only one person – I recommend Nicholas Jubber’s fine book on this). The fact that fairy tales developed organically within a community, that they acquired their narrative components and details from repeated re-tellings, renders them appealingly protean. There is a simplicity to them, because no story survives in the rough and tumble of folk culture that does not hold within it a truth worth telling and a structure stripped of all pretension. Fairy tales are like survivors of some great cataclysm who have been gifted with a rare insight into what really matters in life. To object that fairy tales never happened is as empty and pointless a statement as objecting that the Iliad doesn’t accurately record historical events of the Aegean Bronze Age. As if that matters to the Iliad’s importance in world history and culture.

I was a latecomer to reading, only really mastering it by the age of eight; and the great intensification in my interest in fairy tales came when I was eleven years old, as I started for a single term at a new school deep in the Suffolk countryside. I did not enjoy my time there, so the interest was partly an escapist one; but it was also prompted by the frequent stops we made on the homeward journey in the village of Woolpit, where I discovered the story of the Green Children. I became particularly fascinated by Irish folklore and began a collection of books of fairy tales – these were illustrated editions and adaptations at first, but I soon became eager to get as close as possible to the ‘original’ versions of the stories. I treasured a copy of the 1980 Folio Society edition of The Mabinogion, and carried Yeats’ and Lady Gregory’s edition of Irish folk tales almost everywhere I went. It was obvious to me that these tales were not for children, and that there was nothing childish about them. That was precisely why I loved them so much – children, notoriously, are drawn to gruesome and age-inappropriate content, and while I had no love of horror or gore for its own sake, the grim world of remorseless fairy justice felt irresistibly compelling. I loved the idea of a community of otherworld beings who lived just beyond our reach, both material and intellectual, according to rules we could never quite grasp.

But above all, my fascination with fairy tales was driven by an inner conviction that magic was real; and I was done with the books for children that treated magic as a metaphor or a literary device, or failed to present a convincing account of how it might work (Ursula Le Guin is a noble exception in this regard). If the Harry Potter books had existed I would have hated them, so obvious is it that their author does not believe in magic. But the old stories didn’t mince their words when it came to magic, which was both real, terrible and unhesitatingly accepted as part of the fabric of reality. And the world they spoke of seemed more real than the disenchanted one into which I was being propelled; a world where magic was real (if rare) seemed closer to a reality than a wholly non-magical outlook.

My parents, to their credit, never made me give up any of my ‘childish’ interests. I have heard awful stories of parents who simply decided their child was too old for certain books and interests, and so binned the ‘no longer appropriate’ books and toys. My parents always allowed me total intellectual freedom – albeit in a sort of tacit concordat where, in return, no other freedom of any kind was permitted. But I was content with that. I made the decision for myself, in the summer when I turned thirteen and stood on the cusp of starting at senior school, that I would make the symbolic transition to more adult interests by getting rid of most of my books of fairy tales, replacing them with a shelf of works on Marxism-Leninism (an irony that I now appreciate…). The world-building toys that I had enjoyed for so long vanished from my floor and permanently into the cupboard. I didn’t do any of this in order to be popular with peers, or to conform – I knew I would never be popular, and my refusal to conform was as strong as ever; but I felt that I had to be different on terms that were at least equal to my peers, not by opening myself up to ridicule or mockery by reading fairy tales. So away went the Arabian Nights and in came Marx; although in truth, I realise now that I was searching for something rather similar to magic in the ideological literature I was now reading. For what else is it other than magic to believe that thoughts can change the world?

In reality, I did not get rid of all my books of fairy tales. I held on to a few that it was just too painful to part with. And the worlds I had built and played on my bedroom floor continued to develop in my mind. This experience, of a pointless dismantling of childhood interests just because I felt it was somehow socially expected, when at heart they were still my interests, has given me a profound suspicion of the sort of empty rhetoric that seeks to label certain things as ‘childish’ and others as ‘grown-up’. As an adult, I have found myself returning to all of the interests I had as a child, and my eleven year-old self seems a rather wiser fellow than the various callow incarnations of myself between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five; I think I would enjoy a conversation with him more than with any of those other selves. Late childhood, at least for me, felt like a particularly blessed moment – not only had I just learned to read, suddenly opening all the riches of literature to me, but I did not yet feel the dead hand of ‘grown-up’ expectations on the interests I formed.

Fairy tales are real. They are the best distillation of human experience and human nature – the good and the bad – we will ever find, because they are the product of whole cultures and societies over long stretches of times. Even the greatest individual authors and profoundest seers of human nature, like Shakespeare and Chekhov, cannot really compete. And I do not subscribe to the view that fairy tales are allegories – not usually, anyway. If they are about otherworld beings, then they are about otherworld beings; if they are about magic, then they are about magic. Because those things are part of humanity’s experience of reality too – and I am not so arrogant to say that because they are not usually part of the experience of people in contemporary Britain, they ought to be explained away.

But after all, they’re just fairy tales.