TALES TO ARM US FOR A LIFETIME

Classic Tales And The Misconceptions Related To Them

The first complete Hungarian-language edition of Children’s and Household Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of two hundred and eleven fairy tales published in seven successive editions between 1812 and 1857, appeared in 1989 in a faithful translation by Lajos Adamik and László Márton. One of the anthology’s best-known pieces is the story of Frau Holle, which serves as the basis for the children’s opera of the same title, a prize-winning contender at the Müpa 2020 Composition Competition. But what can a story recorded two centuries ago tell the children of today?

ARE WE REALLY NOT AFRAID OF THE WOLF?

Does the child reader suffer permanent trauma on reading of the witch thrown into the oven or the little mermaid dissolving into foam? Today we know that folk tales essentially served to entertain and educate an adult audience, and that the works of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were not only meant for the little ones. As a good example of how anxieties about the scary nature of fairy tales are nothing new, the Austrian-born child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim devoted a separate chapter to reassuring parents in his 1976 work The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.

Bettelheim explicitly welcomed the opportunity for children to encounter the shadier side of everyday life through stories and fairy tales. He argued that monsters, demons and other frightening figures help a child experience their inherent aggression, anger and fear, thus providing a model for the management of negative emotions. Bettelheim noted that destructive, coarse or anxious thoughts do not enter the child’s mind under the influence of fairy tales – they already reside in a child’s unconscious; however, the interpretative ability needed to dispel them is lacking in childhood. Speaking to children only about the pleasant things in life will lead to a huge tension, as they will feel themselves left alone with the many negative feelings inside. They may come to think that the problem lies within them, that the monster is them. Summarising his argument, Bettelheim notes that tales exert their impact on a child’s true spiritual and emotional plane.

Selective Attention And Trust

Ildikó Boldizsár, a story therapist and author of numerous books for children, shares Bettelheim’s view, emphasising in an interview with Fidelio that children only grasp the elements of stories that appeal to them, taking no interest in things that do not concern them. ‘Essentially we show them examples, and they choose what they feel is theirs’, she observes. Boldizsár also draws attention to the importance of the resolution offered at a story’s ending, which arms the child listener with the confidence that there are answers to life’s challenges, thus providing them with hope and a model to follow.

‘There is no roughness in these tales for children, only justice’, says the story writer and poet Orsolya Fenyvesi, author of Ősvarázserdő (AllMagicWood). With respect to the Hungarian folk tale of Miss Reed-stem Beauty, she recalls that, just as she had done in her own childhood, her daughter skipped over details that appeared brutal to her. At the same time, she adds, fairy tales greatly helped her daughter – then still very small – to understand the loss of her great-grandmothers. ‘The symbolic content prepares them for what they will confront in their later lives. What is more, these tales present difficult topics such as illness or death in a way that children can still digest.’

WHAT DID YOU SAY?!

For Fenyvesi, the archaic expressions in classic fairy tales have an educational role, helping children understand their later reading. Rather than getting hung up over failing to comprehend certain words, children sense their meaning, which is born in their imagination. In this context, there is no great separation between the linguistic inventions of authors and rarely heard words in folk tales.

The writer and illustrator András Dániel, author of Kuflik and Kicsibácsi és Kicsinéni not only uses his own words freely but also revives expressions that have fallen out of use, bringing the modern world of his tales closer to the classics. In one of his Kuflik adventures, for example, young readers can easily deduce the meaning of the word csalitos (spinney) from the context in which it is used.

Besides his linguistic creativity, the author of Kuflik also employs a narrative technique that departs from the traditional, using the familiar turns of classic tales in a sometimes ironic or parodying fashion, and thus granting them additional meaning. ‘Tradition is unavoidable, but on the other hand can and deserves to be used freely. I think it’s good for tradition to remain alive’, adds Dániel, observing that childhood reading, folk tales and the language of famed children’s writer Ervin Lázár dwell within us in the form of layered memories, surfacing unconsciously in the sentences of writers during the creative process.

Footholds In The Familiar

One thing that can help bring an old story closer is enhancing it with contemporary illustrations. ‘Visual elements are very decisive in a child’s imagination. We all remember the images in books that were important to us’, notes Fenyvesi.

Two periods can even meet within the same story, as we see in the tale A boszorkánycica (The Witch’s Kitten) by poet and writer Bálint Harcos. While the author conspicuously adheres to the world of Grimms’ fairy tales with the castle setting and classic tropes (such as three tests), the language is contemporary. Helping with this is illustrator Éva Katinka Bognár, who drew a fridge in the witch’s house and post-it notes on its door reminding her of things to buy. ‘Essentially, she did the same thing in the pictures for the book that I did in the text by using today’s slang, for example in the speech of one of the roughneck cat characters’, says Harcos.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY – AND WHAT LIES BEHIND

WHAT DEFINES A ‘CLASSIC’ FAIRY TALE?

Vladimir Propp, one of the fathers of modern research into fairy tales, writes in detail about the definition and categorisation of tales in his 1928 work Morphology of the Folktale. The Soviet Russian folklorist was the first scholar to analyse his country’s folk tales to determine their basic structural components. Based on the criteria of the system he created, in referring to classic fairy tales in this article, we mean folk tales, the works of the Brothers Grimm and of Hans Christian Andersen, as well as fairy tales passed down from long ago, which have entered the canon of children’s literature and, thanks to their wide renown, continue to enjoy a significant readership to this day.

While Bettelheim himself recognised that the realm of folk tales seems to have little bearing on modern life, he also saw the nature of inner human problems as far more universal, so that tales can greatly help in understanding and resolving them.

The real power of classic stories lies deep beneath the surface of the plot. A case study in Boldizsár’s book Hamupipőke Facebook-profilja (Cinderella’s Facebook Profile) alludes to the story of Frau Holle, whose familiar parable encourages diligence and preaches that the good shall receive its just reward and the bad its well-deserved punishment. However, Boldizsár believes we can also understand the story as one of a life crisis, in which the girl’s hand is cut by her own ‘lifeline’ and, when looking for the lost spindle, she descends not into the well, but to the depths of her own soul. Before returning to the real world, she must learn to retake control of her destiny, and when she shakes the eiderdowns to remove the fluff and snow, she is really discovering her capacity for joy. The well, the realm of Frau Holle, is thus an arena of self-discovery, and the stepsister is punished not for her laziness, but because, instead of following her own path, she tries to follow the protagonist’s.

‘When captivated by a story, the symbolism within it works in our minds even without us having to utter these great truths. And this is far more important than spoon-fed, ready-made lessons’, adds Fenyvesi. ‘The truths of fairy tales arm children for life with a moral compass and moral sense.’

Where Anything Can Happen

We don’t identify with a story only when its circumstances match our own. Just as the author of this article, as a child, would gladly have taken Nils Holgersson’s place on his journey across Sweden on the neck of Martin the goose, so did Bálint Harcos have a similar experience throwing himself into the adventures of Pippi Longstocking. At such times adventure is the primary thing, and in the sweep of events children usually like to identify with the character at the centre of the action, who heroically passes tests, solves riddles or outwits pursuers. In Harcos’s experience, it is often the parents themselves who hold nonsensical preconceptions about the protagonists of a tale, and who will only read stories to their kids from books meant exclusively either for girls or boys.

‘A real work of fiction conveys no message beyond itself: it is the message. For me, the importance of children’s literature also lies in the meeting between the freedom and anarchy of art and the energy and autonomy of children’, confesses Harcos. Whether a fairy tale is classic or modern, the most important experience that it can offer is what we would all love our children to know: the sense of freedom.