Into the Woods, 13: Art From the Fairy Tale Forest

"What
was the appeal [of fairy tales]? It's hard to be definite about that.
The stories didn't have any direct application to our real lives. They
weren't much good from a practicle point of view. At this time, we were
living half the year in the Canadian north woods, and we knew if we went
for a walk there, we were unlikely to come upon any castles, if we met
any wolves or bears they wouldn't be the talking kind, if we kissed a
frog it would most likely pee on us, and if we got lost, we wouldn't
find any short-sighted, evil old women with patisserie cottages and
child-sized ovens. Rescue, if any, would not be applied by princes. So
it wasn't our outer lives that Grimms' tales addressed: it was our inner
ones. These stories have survived as stories, over so many centuries
and in so many variations, because they do make such an appeal to the
inner life -- you could say 'the dreaming self' and not be far wrong,
because they are both the stuff of nightmare and magical thinking. As
Margaret Drabble says, there is a mystery in such stories which is
beyond the rational mind."
   - Margaret Atwood

"From time to time, I still pull [Grimms' Fairy Tales] down from the shelf,
especially when I am writing; I recently discovered details from 'The
Maiden Without Hands' and 'Godfather Death' popping up in the novel at
which I am currently at work. I found myself rereading the stories,
mesmerized once again.; I was startled to realize that the fairy tales
were still deeply twined into my unconscious life, and because the act
of writing taps the vein of the unconcious so silently, the tales flood
back into my current stories with their metaphors and morals at the
times when I am most unaware, most deeply immersed in creation. I
thought I could leave the Grimms brothers behind, but -- as with any
strong and complicated relationship -- it has not proved to be nearly as
simple as that."  - Linda Gray Sexton

"Fairy
Tales were the refuge of my troubled childhood. Despite all the
messages contained in them about being a dutiful daughter, a good
girl, which I internalized to some extent, I was most obsessed with
the idea of justice, the insistence in most tales that the righteous
would prevail.”
  - bell hooks

"The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they
can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the
odds with gritted teeth.”  - Marina Warner

"Early on I realized that stories could  save you. " - Julia Alvarez

Kinder– und Haumärchen

by Diane Thiel

Liegt in dem Märchen miener Kinderjahre

Als in der Wahrheit, die das Leben lehrt.

—Frederich Schiller

(Deeper meaning lies in the fairy tales of my childhood

than in the truth that is taught in life.)

Saint Nikolaus had a giant gunny sack

to put the children in if they were bad.

It was a hole so deep you'd never come back.

A porch swing full of stories, where the smoke

went up in hot, concentric, perfect rings

and filled our heads with unbelievable things

A nursery heavy with a history

where nothing was whatever it had seemed,

where Aschenputtel's sisters cut their feet

half off — so desperate they were to fit.

And in the end, they also lost their eyes

when steel–grey birds descended from the skies.

Rotkäppchen's wolf was someone that she knew,

who wooed her with a man's words in the woods.

But she escaped. It always struck me most

how Grandmother, whose world was swallowed whole,

leapt fully formed out of the wolf alive.

Her will came down the decades to survive

in mine — my heart still desperately believes

the stories where somebody re–conceives

herself, emerges from the hidden belly,

the warring home dug deep inside the city.

We live today those stories we were told.

Es war einmal im tiefen tiefen Wald.

"This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a
fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born
we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories."
 
- Ben Okri

Indeed, we are.

The art of the fairy tale forest above is: "Snow White" by Nancy Ekholm Burkert, "Snow White" by Yvonne Gilbert, The Twelve Dancing Princesses" by Ruth Sanderson, "Donkeyskin" by Nadezhda Illarionova, "Donkeyskin" by Toshiyuki Enoki, "Little Red Riding Hood" by Daniel Egnéus, "Little Red Cap" by Lisbeth Zwerger, "Sleeping Beauty" illustrations by  Errol Le Cain, Kinuko Y. Craft, and Mercer Mayer.