What is a Fairy Tale?

This post will serve two very nice functions. First, it is my assigned blog for the week, so doing it will complete my homework. Second, this will allow Nicole to better understand if all of Aliah's favorite stories can be classified as "Fairy Tales" or just plain stories.

The most important element of fairy tales is the magic. All fairy tales have some form of magic, which allows heroes (and villains) to do unexpected things. However unlike legends or myths, fairy tale magic is not the intervention of a God into the world we know. Instead it is set in a place where the magic is taken for granted. For example, when you read Rapunzel, you never say to yourself "now that doesn't make sense! How could she survive so long in the tower without eating anything?" When we read fairy tales we must have a suspension of disbelief that lets us imagine that the stories are possible.

Another extremely important characteristic of fairy tales is the adaptability. Whereas myths and legends are based on true events, fairy tales are not. Whether you believe each fairy tale has a unique birthplace or that fairy tales sprung up in multiple places simultaneously, you cannot deny that they are, at their core, fictional stories. Also, fairy tales do not have authors, because they were exclusively told orally for so long. Because there is no original author nor an original true story to follow, fairy tales can change very easily. In fact, every single person that hears a fairy tale becomes a potential changer.

To illustrate this, imagine you just finished reading The Hunger Games. The movie is due out next month, and your friend wants to know the story before he goes with you, so he asks you to tell it to him (since he has not time to read it). In telling the story to him, a couple times you remembered incorrectly and said something that was not in the story. In this case you made a mistake. You messed up. And if you re-read the books and tell the story again, you'll probably get it right this time.

With Fairy Tales, there is no right or wrong way to tell the story. If my mother tells me the story of Beauty and the Beast, and then I tell it to a friend with some different details, I have not wronged anyone because there is no author. And as long as i kept the main ideas, the archetypes, in place, then I have only adapted the work in my own unique way.

There you go, now you know a bit more about identifying Fairy Tales. I will leave you with one last way of distinguishing between Fairy Tales and other stories: if the culminating scene, the climax, shows a complete lack of emotion and of detail, you are reading a Fairy Tale.

Here are two climaxes from two timeless works - see if you can identify which is a fairy tale (bonus points for naming the books; I omitted the names of any characters):

1) "[the villain] fell upon [the hero], and ate her all up."

2) "[the hero] was upon them, and the terror of his coming filled the enemy with madness. [The enemy] fell on their faces before him...Like a black smoke driven by a mounting wind, they fled."

Note: I will post in a couple days the credit for these quotes, but for now I would like to see if my readers can identify the famous books first.