Open Wardrobes

As I sit here working on the final stages of The Princess and the Moon it occurs to me that my description of this process begs a natual question: "What is a 30-something year old writer doing writing a fairytale? Isn't that kid's stuff?" And certainly our society seems to have had as an unspoken assumption that fairytales are for kids, not adults. I disagree.


There is something universal, after all, about this genre. Stories such as Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel, etc, these are all part of our collective culture. Often such stories are very simple in form, but perhaps it's because they get at bigger ideas, like heroism, selfishness, self-sacrifice, and the reality of evil. They are archetypes, and just because we grow older doesn't mean we grow out of these stories and what they can teach us.

C.S. Lewis once pointed out that fairytales didn't really start out as "just for kids" - they ended up in the nursery, as he put it, "not because they had become popular with children, but because they had ceased to become popular with adults." In other words, just as people once put the furniture they no longer wanted in their living room into the nursery with the kids, so went the out-of-fashion stories.


These days I think we are seeing a resurgence of popularity in such tales with adults - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the other Chronicles of Narnia are a perfect example. At their core they fit the model of the fairyale (and Lewis himself even categorized them as such). In fact, I would argue that much of what we categorize as "fantasy" these days are in fact fairytales at their root, and not just Narnia. Harry Potter, for example, when you get down to it is a Quest story, albeit on a more epic level than the Brothers Grimm, in a world filled with magic and if not fairy godmothers, then at least a wizard godfather. Many of those who wrote lasting fantasy works were themselves fed on the world of "faerie," Nordic sagas, and other tales which contained many elements of the fantastical - it's not such a large leap from that to the creation of new "fantasy" worlds, be it Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. In fact, both of these were written with the idea that they are "really" our own world, that there is a magical level beyond what we see day to day. How different is that really from the fairytales we all grew up with? When a perfectly ordinary day could suddenly have a genie or an evil witch thrust upon it? That such things could really happen?

There's a lot more that could be said about this, and the idea that the world is more than just what we see. I for one am glad to see these sorts of stories on the upswing of popularity. I grew up on Narnia, The Dark is Rising, the Greek myths, etc, and that's probably why the fantasy/fairytale genre holds such appeal for me - it's just what I know.