Once upon a time there was an old man and an old woman who had nine sons, but no daughters… This interpretation of the wonderful Finnish folktale The Girl Who Sought Her Nine Brothers is based on the copyrighted version found in Tales from a Finnish Tupa, by James Cloyd Bowman and Margery Bianco, first published in 1936 and now published by the University of Minnesota Press.
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Kevin Austin Tseng used to weigh 220 pounds in the 6th grade. This may sound crazy, but he lost that weight because of a fairy tale, one his father told to him at night. Now, he believes that fairy tales can change lives.
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You don’t need to be a fairy tale aficionado to note that Anna Wahlenburg has a gift for capturing the human spirit through fantasy. The introduction for “Linda-Gold and the Old King,” is a story in its own right. It came to my mind again recently as I pondered a question posed by one of my good friends from summer camp.
“What is the value of fantasy?”
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In our original introduction to this website we said, Cabinet des Fées does not seek to define the fairy tale, but only to share and promote the tale type in all of its various manifestations. While we still do not intend to define the tale type, we’d like to add to the general discussion yet another view on the fairy tale as a type of story and speculate about why that type has retained its power since its birth as a literary form.
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No matter what language you speak, all of us can remember those words that begin fantastical adventures. Most of us, too, can remember the fuzzy feeling that settled over us like fairy dust by the time the story ended. Perhaps that is reason enough why fairy tales are important, because they make us happy.
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I walked through arbors, between stalls selling pots and seeds, looking at the displays. They were beautiful, but I could never imagine having a garden so elaborate, so perfectly designed. And then, I saw a display that was different from the others. At the back of the display space was a small cottage, and growing all around it were herbs and medicinal plants, the sorts of plants you would find in medieval herbals…
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by Amanda White Germany is the home to rolling hills, winding rivers, and forests so densely wooded they’ve been termed black — in all, the perfect setting for fairy tales to be woven into folklore. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm knew their homeland was ripe for the picking, as if each story was an apple just
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By Lyz Reblin During my nine-month journey to my destination I chose to research the planet before encountering its inhabitants. In the spaceship’s library, I found a text titled “The Classic Fairy Tales” edited by a human named Maria Tatar. The tome seemed to be a misnomer, for no fairies were to be found within
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By Elizabeth Hopkinson Almost everyone knows the familiar fairy tale ending: the prince marries the princess and they live happily ever after. But does this simple conclusion embody all that fairy tales have to tell us about human sexuality? By no means! “Intentionally or not, (fairy tales) have been used to enforce what has been
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By Sophie Masson Aberfoyle, Perthshire, Scotland It is a pretty track from the manse to the hill. Early spring, and the trees are beginning to put out new young leaves. Subtle colour permeates the landscape; the pale purple of growing tips, the russet of lingering winter, the film of green beginning to thicken, the darkness
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Kate Crackernuts: The Hen-Wife and her Cauldron of Wisdom by Colleen Szabo This tale is a wisdom tale featuring the old symbol of creativity and wisdom, the nut. We still use the term “nut” to denote the head, one location commonly assigned for wisdom; in fact, nuts are sort of like brains in a skull
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Shamanic Initiations: A hidden Theme within the Fairy Tale of Hansel and Gretel by Franco Bejarano The fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” was first recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 around the southwestern corner of Germany. The tale features a brother and sister who, while lost in the forest, encounter a cannibalistic witch. At
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Even after over a century since its first publication, the stories remain well-told and the collection varied. With something there for everyone, I found many motifs and themes that touched me on a personal level. But I also became interested in the author — herself born of a Japanese father and an English mother — and in her reasons for retelling these stories. So in this article I intend to examine both the stories and the author, looking both at what they have to offer a 21st-century reader and how they reflect the original social context and aims of Yei Theodora Ozaki.
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An examination of Yeats’s belief in a mystical and supernatural universe with reference to A Vision and “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” William Butler Yeats is renowned for his poems and plays which have mythic and philosophical structures incorporating the Celtic faerie pantheon as well as Greek mythology. However, suffusing all his works is a deeper
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