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Additionally, the feminist aesthetician Estella Lauter criticizes the sexist sub-presentation of females in some modern tales, such as “The Little Red-riding-hood”, and “Hansel and Gretel”, where females should be always polite, and should depend totally on males to survive. The point we should get to know then is that the composition of a folktale is totally depending on the “fairness” of the author. Using this criterion, we separate between good fairy tales, and false fairy tales.
The moral and acceptable form of fairy tales is needed to encourage speculation, as say Peter and Iona Opie in their book, “Classic Fairy Tales”. They say that fairy tales give children access to wonder, imagine, dream and enlarge their horizon. Moreover, they indicate that someone who isn’t used to speculation might “as well walk on four legs as on two”. In addition, fairy tales are the shortest entrance to children’s hearts, when they present them the most inevitable reality in our life, which is death, in a simplified manner, using magic and mythology. Thus, fairy tales are a friendlier mean to define death-and all realities- to youngsters. Hence, fairy tales could mostly be virtually imaginary, but realistic if well observed.
Narrow-minded scientists and theorists such as the British Peter Parley disagree with the use of fairy tales as teachers. Such people think that folk stories simulate to children a different world, where good is always victorious, and where imagination and the legendary hide the true real life they are supposed to face when they mature. Those opponents of fairy tales think that the use of documents full with technical essays, exact facts, numbers, and scientific theories instead of fairies is the only way to teach children in our modern industrial life, and to help them in getting used to their future concrete life. The “fact” that Parley and his supporters have missed is that imagination is the key idea of perhaps most of today’s modern technology achievements.
When Jules Verne, the famous French author composed his science fiction tales in the late 1800’s, describing an imaginary undersea transportation vehicle, no one expected that his imaginary vehicle would become a reality. Accordingly, Parley ought to realize that offering freedom of imagination to children through fairy tales is more “realistic” than limiting their minds by abstract and passive theoretical education.
It is true that fairy tales existed and will exist as long as life is finding its way, and as good and bad simultaneously exist. Jack Zipes, in his essay “Introduction to the Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”, states that fairy tales do not just focus on happiness and charm, but also on cruelty and betrayal, murder and death, which are variable parts of reality.
In conclusion, the simple and true form of fairy tales is the one that is unequivocally needed, to define truth in a world where reality is hidden and virtualized, and where immorality is edited to appear virtually as morality. Otherwise, children may lose their creative imagination that provides them with the hope of reaching a better life, stimulates fair ambition inside them, and differentiate clearly and precisely between moral and immoral actions in front of them. Intellectuals must use today’s super technology to improve the “fairness” and the effectiveness of fairy tales, instead of approaching to commercial entertainment that consequently hides the moral of the new versions of fairy tales. In addition, the presence of fairy tales reminds mankind that evil, dishonesty, misery, injustice and intolerance are still threatening their life, and that they must act to terminate these forms of vice.
Ayman Hassan el Hakea, AUC Freshman, Engineering Faculty, Cairo, Egypt.
References:
Ashliman D. L. “Folklore and Mythology: Electronic Texts”.
Vandergrift, Kay. “Snow White Page: Context for the Study of Snow White”.
<"http://scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/snowwhite.html." >
It is that need to keep and protect national heritages that induced the German brothers and philologists, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm to collect folk and fairy tales throughout Saxony, Rhineland, Pomerania, Sudetenland, Bavaria, and all other parts of Germany, and then to publish their famous fairy tale collection “Kinder und Haus-Maerchen” in 1812. The original ancient tellers of fairy tales were typical countrymen and countrywomen, who put inside their tales their folklore, their customs, their tradition, and their inestimable culture.
This inextricable link between fairy tales, and the culture of the place where they are told, appears in the Grimm’s tales, as the writer John Ellis describes. He focuses on how the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the famous story collectors, were concerned about their own German folklore, and about German nationalism particularly in their fairy tales, creating a true collection that reflects the culture of medieval Germany. Those early collections of fairy tales succeeded to describe precisely the milieu where they had been told, as they were collected from rural and less educated storytellers throughout the middle ages’ Europe.
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Saladin
My name is Ayman el-Hakea, I am a Construction Engineering graduate from the American University in Cairo. My origins date to an interesting mixture of Yemeni, Moroccan, Albanian, and Egyptian ancestors. I always try to be a moderate Muslim, I like animation, geopolitics, comparative religion, and football. I like to be with "people"...and I hope my writing isn't boring for anyone.
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