Fairytales

'Behave yourself!' said Grandfather sternly, for though he loved all human souls he loved them better when they did not spit. 'And don't you dare to disparage fairy tales. A fairy tale, dear sir, in relating miraculous happenings as though they were normal events of every day, is a humble acknowledgement of the fact that this universe is a box packed full of mysteries of which we understand absolutely nothing at all. You can wonder till you're blue in the face as to how the giraffe got his neck, or the gooseberry puffed himself out, but you don't know. You can't know. Any theory you may evolve about a giraffe's neck, my dear sir, is a fairy tale.'

-Elizabeth Goudge, Henrietta's House, 114-115.

Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

-G. K. Chesterton, epigraph from Neil Gaiman's Coraline

The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz is the fairy tale dehumbugged, and the good news it bears is the good news that hard and conscientious effort and a little help from our friends pay off in the end, and faith is its own reward. The most important thing to have faith in is ourselves, and that is also the chief magic. Insofar as they receive their hearts' desire, Dorothy and her friends, it is essentially a do-it-yourself operation, and the joy of it is not beyond the walls of the world but within the walls of the world. The book was published in the year 1900, and maybe it is not stretching things too far to say that in a way it foreshadows something of what became of the fairy tale of the Gospel in the century it ushered in. The magic and the mystery fade. Like the Emerald City, the city whose gates are pearl and whose walls are adorned with jasper and onyx and sapphire turns out to be too good to be true for all except those who see it through stained glass; and just as for Dorothy home is finally not the Land of Oz, where all things are possible, but Kansas, where never yet has a camel managed to squeeze through the eye of a needle, so for us home is not that country that Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jeptha, glimpsed from afar, but rather just home, just here, where there are few surprises...

[But] we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth...Neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again any more than it was home for Dorothy in the end either because in the Oz books that follow The Wizard, she keeps coming back again and again to Oz because Oz, not Kansas, is where her heart is, and the wizard turns out to be not a humbug but the greatest of all wizards after all.

-Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth, 95, 96, 97.

We Make Because We are Made

...To quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”...

“Dear Sir,” I said—“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misued). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

...Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

-J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkein Miscellany, 127.

Adjectives

The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power...

-J. R. R. Tolkein, "On Fairy-Stories," A Tolkein Miscellany, 108.

King Lear as Fairytale

The opening scene of [King Lear] has a fairytale quality about it, with the two wicked sisters and the one good one, as in Cinderella, and the richest treasure going to the one who gives the best speech as to the one who makes the right wish or opens the right casket, but it isn't long before Shakespeare turns all this on its head and the hope that they will all live happily ever after gets lost in nightmare. And yet, and yet, he seems to say, maybe life is like a fairy tale notwithstanding, if only in the sense that all disguises are stripped away in the end and all evil spells undone, so that even the Beast becomes beautiful when he discovers that Beauty loves him, and even the old king, with Beauty dead in his arms, finally becomes a human being, and the last word, like Albany's, is a word of mercy.

-Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel, 153-154.

Childish Things

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," 34.

Kid Lit

The truth is...that [fairy tales] are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it.

...Am I to patronise sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?

-C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said,” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, 47.

He Really Likes the Trains

Well, you'll never guess who I saw riding her bike today
She was wearing hiking boots and a mini skirt
She had a license plate that read Cinderella
So I guess that's who it must have been
So I asked her about her evil stepmother
Said she locked her up behind the cellar door
She was tired of scrubbing floors and doing the dishes
Said that cleaning stuff was quite a bore

Well I saw Puff the Dragon down on Main Street
He was standing on a corner, smoking a cigarette
I asked him about his home on the seashore
About his lighthouse, and if he had any regrets
About leaving the sand and the ocean
Standing on the side of the street and smoke his stuff
He said that it would take some getting used to
But that he really, he really likes the trains

I was walking with my brother down the Prairie Path
When all of a sudden much to our surprise
There was a flash of brilliant color amidst the foliage
And out of the bushes flew a Mighty Mouse
He was hot on the trail of an evil villain
His job to serve justice at any cost
The next thing I knew he turned to Pete and I
And he said, hey boys, I think I'm lost

-Whipple Tree Band

Childish Things

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, quoted by Alan Jacobs, The Narnian, xxii.

Communion

And may the bread on your tongue
Leave a trail of crumbs
To lead the hungry back to the place that you are from

-Derek Webb, Take to the World

The Supreme Adventure

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose...The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale. -G. K. Chesterton, "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family", Heretics

The Gospel as Fairy Tale...

And yet, so what? So what if even in his sin the slob is loved and forgiven when the very mark and substance of his sin and of his slobbery is that he keeps turning down the love and forgiveness because he either doesn't believe them or doesn't want them or just doesn't give a damn? In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales extraordinary things happen. Henry Ward Beecher cheats on his wife, his God, himself, but manages to keep on bringing the Gospel to life for people anyway, maybe even for himself. Lear goes beserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ. It is impossible for anybody to leave behind the darkness of the world he carries on his back like a snail, but for God all things are possible. That is the fairy tale.

-Frederick Buechner, The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale 7-8.

Strangers and Aliens

We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri.

But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still...

-Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale

Common Sense

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

-James Thurber, "The Little Girl and the Wolf"

DESDICHADO

*This is the Heir; come let us kill Him.
*Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her Beloved?

Christ walks the world again, His lute upon His back,
His red robe rent to tatters, his riches gone to rack,
The wind that wakes the morning blows His hair about His face,
His hands and feet are ragged with the ragged briar’s embrace,
For the hunt is up behind Him and His sword is at His side,…
Christ the bonny outlaw walks the whole world wide,
Singing: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me,
Lie among the bracken and break the barley bread?
We will see new suns arise in golden, far-off skies,
For the Son of God and Woman hath not where to lay His head.”

Christ walks the world again, a prince of fairy-tale,
He roams, a rascal fiddler, over mountain and down dale,
Cast forth to seek His fortune in a bitter world and grim,
For the stepsons of His Father’s house would steal His Bride from Him;
They have weirded Him to wander till He bring within His hands
The water of eternal youth from black-enchanted lands,
Singing: “Lady, lady, will you come away with me,
Or sleep on silken cushions in the bower of wicked men?
For if we walk together through the wet and windy weather,
When I ride back home triumphant you will ride beside Me then.”

Christ walks the world again, new-bound on high emprise,
With music in His golden mouth and laughter in His eyes;
The primrose springs before Him as He treads the dusty way,
His singer’s crown of thorn has burst in blossom like the may,
He heedeth not the morrow and He never looks behind,
Singing: “Glory to the open skies and peace to all mankind.”
Singing: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me?
Was never man lived longer for the hoarding of his breath;
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain…
If we perish in the seeking…why, how small a thing is death!”

-Dorothy Sayers, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs