Fairy Tale and Fantasy - Ros Ballaster

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Um, welcome back everyone. Um, sorry to interrupt your conversations. We'll make a shift. I hope you have all sorted yourselves and relieved yourselves to your satisfaction. Um. It gives me immense pleasure to chair this next two talks. Um, we've got an absolute treat lined up for you personally as a fairy tale nerd. I can't wait to hear these.

So, first, without further ado, Professor Ross Baluster, who is a fellow at Mansfield College and an expert in 18th century, does an awful lot of amazing work in women's writing and is also a British Academy fellow. So without further ado, I won't over speak about what Rose is going to speak about. I'll just let her deliver. Thank you very much for having me. Okay. Hello. Great. Thank you. So thanks so much for being here to hear me talk, um, about the enchantment of a fairy tale.

Um, I hope I can be almost as interesting or capture your attention and the way that fairy tales have held my attention for. Oh, I think probably about 40 years. Um, so let me see if this works here. Here's what I plan to cover today. I'm going to start by talking about the particular property of the fairy tale, its powers of metamorphosis.

And I'm going to go on to offer some definitions of the word fairy and talk about the distinction between folk and fairy. Um. Um, and then I'm going to move on to talk about elements of and in the fairy tale, giving you some examples from fairy tales of the importance of those primary elements water, air, earth and fire as forms of metamorphic power that drive the plot and also represent the power of fairy tales that that kind of power that fairy tales exercised over auditors and readers.

So let's start with how do we define the fairy tale? Let me propose that we think of fairy tale as the story of Metamorphoses from the Greek metaphor change and morph form. Appropriately enough, let's start with a tale about fairy tales that invites us to think about the changes in form that are the habitat of tales about fairies. So the example I've taken from is from the most recent, and I think and have a wildly successful collection of tales from the novelist Clare Pollard in 2024.

Has anyone read The Modern Fairies yet? It's wonderful. Please just go and read it. It's fantastic work of short fiction. It's won many prizes already. Um, so I'm using Pollard to introduce us to the space and place where fairy tales underwent their first metamorphosis.

So their first metamorphoses, if you like, from spoken tales delivered by nurses to their young charges, to printed versions of stories told by adult aristocrats in the salons taken from the salons of the court of Louis the 14th in 17th century Paris. So here's Claire Pollard. This is a telephone. Quiet. Henrietta Murray again begins, rehearsed and fluent. Now, to whatever greatness destiny may elevate those it favours. I think we all agree. There's no escape in this world from sorrow.

Even fairies themselves have a burden to endure. Did you know that these creatures have a misfortune of being compelled to change their shape a few days in every lunar month? It's true. They become their animal selves, whether that beast is celestial, terrestrial or aquatic. So it was that at her time of the month, the fairy unquiet found that she transformed into a thick, slick, muscular eel whose skin glistened with a rainbow. Now only eight.

Juli du Mura 1617 1716 was indeed a teller of what the French called Conti fe um stories of fairies, all the stories by the fairies, um. Her first collection was published in 1698, after she was exiled from the French court in 1694. Um, she was exiled because she published a satirical pamphlet about the king Louis the 14th and his mistress Madame de Manzano.

Among the many metamorphoses of the fairy tale is its couching in this way of a kind of political critique in the form of a fantastic tale about other worlds, which is what it's doing when we think of the familiar plots of fairy tales Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel. They often concern transformations brought about by fairies. Those whimsical, sometimes bad tempered beings who inflict changes on humans or animals into different forms.

Waking to sleeping from a mouse to a coachman. From a prince to a bird or a frog. But here the story that Maura's telling, it's a story about forced transformation of a fairy. When a fairy has her period, she must become an ill.

That's the French word on yet another example. Marina Warner invites us to think about the transformation, which isn't really improvement or reform or change, but rather a kind of pleasurable repetition that enables us to keep inhabiting the space of story. In this description, that she gives in her little critical introduction to the genre of fairy tale.

She says, think of the fairy tale as a plant genus, like roses or fungi or grasses, which seed and root and flower here in their changing species, and colour and size and shape where they spring. Well, think of it as a tune which can migrate from a voice to a symphony to a penny whistle for a fairy tale doesn't exist in a fixed form or medium. The story's interest, she says, isn't exhausted by repetition, reformulation, or retelling.

But there pleasure gains from the endless permutations performed on the nucleus of the tale, its DNA as it were. Now, Warner here uses two metaphors to describe the fairy tale a metaphor. Back to my metaphor is a figure of speech where one thing stands for another. So he asks us to think of the fairy tale as a plant, which changes on every instance that it recedes and is planted.

And he also asks us to think of it as a tune, which can be differently presented by the different singers who take it on. She tells us there's a nucleus to the story on which there are permutation permutations. When it appears again, we might call that nucleus the plot. It might be embellished differently by different speakers, but it has a core, a nucleus that survives and is still recognisable.

Now. Warner's use of metaphor is in direct contrast to the habitual style of the fairy tale, the way that she describes the fairy tale itself. She herself says in this same short history of fairy tales, she says the fairy tales characteristic manner is matter of fact. Fairy tales are one dimensional, depth less abstract and sparse. They're not, she says, ornate and metaphorical. They sit, she says. They tell the tale as it is. No more, no less.

Different audiences, different historical moments of reception, different styles of voice and timbre on the part of the speaker introduced variants of and to the tale, but it retains its potentialities to revert. It can change backwards as well as forward. These tales and I want to stress this I don't think they inherently advocate resistance or change. They can also go backwards as well as forwards. Let's look a little deeper into the name fairy tale.

Or as I told you earlier, it was termed by the French tellers who established it as a genre in the later 17th century. The context say this helps us, I think, to understand a little better the sense of a story with a destiny, a destination, but an infinite capacity to change and transform.

So Marina Warner, who is I think the finest historian of the fairy tale, tells us in her first book on the subject, From the Beast to the blonde, that the etymology of the word fairy derives from fata, Latin feminine word fata. It's a rare variant form of Thar tome, fate, the goddess of destiny. Forthem also, she tells us, means that which is spoken, so that all relatives already written into that use of the word.

The verb fari to speak gives French fe, Italian fata, Spanish hadar, all of which mean fairy. We might think to, she says of the classical fates, three women who spin threads of the future on a spindle who are metamorphosed into fairies in later versions, uh, post classical versions. And those fairies, of course, perform fateful roles in the stories of humans.

As Byatt, contemporary novelist, talks about her decline in interest in the long form of the novel in the 1980s and her sense of the pleasure of experimenting with short forms and set stories which manifested, if you don't know it, in this wonderful collection called The Djinn in the Nightingales Eyes Great Collection of Fairy Tales, and then 1994.

She is, though, talking about her novel possession, and she describes writing a version of that fairy tale and in which a man chooses between three women, putting it as an inset story in that novel possession.

She says the pleasure of writing it was in handling the old worn counters of the characterless persons, the fate of the consecutive events, including the helpless commentary of the writer on the unavoidable grip of the story, and a sense that I was myself partaking in the continuity of the tales by retelling them in a new context, in a way old and new. I like the idea of the writer slipping in the unavoidable grip of story rather than story gripping readers necessarily.

So you can see here that parallel between the grip of the story on the reader and the grip of fate on its protagonists, fairy and human alike. Fairies, then, are both predictors of fate and in the grip of stories that determine their fate.

Unquiet must become an ill at her time as a month. Well is a relation in terms of the everyday nature of the magic that's found in both. I want to differentiate a bit fairy tale from folklore.

Scholars distinguish between folktales using the German word machen, which associate strongly with place and are not signed and dated, and literary fairy tales, custom hidden in German, which are an art form transmitted increasingly through print and commercial forms, coming from the spoken word of salon and parlour games, and departing from the unlettered ness of the folk or people, while claiming to derive from the spoken word bird shells, Paros shells.

Pecos Tales can't speak in the 17th century came to be known as the Tales of Mother Goose, suggesting this bridge between the oral tradition of unlettered tale tellers entering the salon cultures of the educated. So if you look at these two early 18th century images of a female tale teller and her audience, on one side you have a frontispiece from a 1729 edition of Charles Paros Tales, with Mother Goose spinning and telling her tales to a seated audience by the hearth.

On the other side, you have a frontispiece from the 1725 edition of Marie Donnelly's collection, which shows a privileged lady. Interestingly, her hand is also held high, as is Mother Goose's, but she's mid-performance in her salon, delivering her tale to an enraptured aristocratic audience. Paho and Donnelly were both composing in the later 17th century, and the two traditions are sitting side by side with each other, rather than one metamorphosing into the other.

So I don't want to say there were folktales, and then there were fairy tales so much as to say they sit side by side. One might argue that in some ways, the folk tale only comes into visibility at the point that the fairy tale starts to be distinguished from it. In both cases, the audience, you'll notice, are not necessarily depicted as children. Might be small by comparison, but they're not necessarily children. What marks them is their attention rather than their age.

What I would say here is that both fairy and folk, I think a ways of thinking about futurity and thinking about narrative outside of the twin forces of a Christian providential ism, that providential wisdom that insists that God scripts our future. And a classical mythology. Another kind of theological drive that also insists on powerful and distant, primarily masculine authority driving human history. The spirits of place that are found in these narrative traditions.

Folk and fairy are local. They're intimate that secular. They're attached to place and person. They facilitate the transition to the modern while retaining connection to the past. Fairy tale, says Marina Warner, face two ways towards a past realm of belief on one side and towards a sceptical present on the other. So to understand the particularity of a fairy tale as a form of fantasy, I'm going to look further at the elements that go to make up its composition.

Fairies were also theorised by Paracelsus through the elements in his book on nymphs, sylphs, pygmies, and Salamanders, The Four Kinds of Fairy, and he associates them with the four elements theorised by cosmologist and poet and pedigrees. Uh fifth century before Christ as the primary basis of all matter water, air, earth and fire. It might be worth just stopping to note here that fairies often seem to generate a kind of sense of categorisation and listing that when people talk about fairies,

I seem to start listing. I think of, um, a book that enchanted me. A series of books that enchanted me when I was younger. The Flower Fairies of Sicily, Mary Barker, um, in the 1920s. So in the rest of this lecture, I'm going to explore the sense that fairy tales consist of elements that metamorphose, that they're tales of metamorphosis, chosen or forced. And I'm going to concentrate on the earliest examples of the genre of the fairy, sometimes also termed the one detail.

The 17th century French tradition. Though we will look at a tale from the Brothers Grimm for our fourth element, fire, which is also going to move us forward in history. In doing this, I don't want to suggest a story of progressive advance or even coherent development here.

Rather, I want to pay attention to the metamorphic powers of the fairy tale, its preoccupation with change from one form to another, which can be set to progressive or conservative ends, to rebel against power, or to reassert powers authority. I want also to suggest that the tradition of the fairy tale has a long association with a sense of the connectedness of all forms of life, our responsibilities for mutual care of our environment, and care for the environment so we can hear the traditions.

I think of fairy stories resonating in modern fictions of climate disaster and potential salvation, in imagining the voices of spirits speaking for and behalf of elements that are under threat, such as earth, air and water, or through the ignition of our planet as a result of global warming.

The tales I've selected here are in a tradition in which humans or fairies are forced to transform into another element, and then strive to speak from the prison of this new materiality and to call out the abuse of power that's confined them and put at risk the balance of the elements and the powers of our everyday forms of life and being.

Um, I realise I haven't put, um. Okay. That's helpful to watch with me. So thank you. Shout out to me. Okay. So let's start with water. Um Yamaha Yoruba anfitriao from the Greek. Saraswati from the Hindu. So, uh, Celtic. Nix's Germanic and Scandinavian. These are all ocean and freshwater spirits, powerful goddesses, mermaids with the power to lure sailors and land dwellers through their song to their own drowning.

Water is the element of Fantastic Tales, an entire alternative universe populated by sea beings whose lives mirror our own, and who also threatened to pull us into their deeps. Think of Salman Rushdie's children's novel heroine and the Sea of Stories, 1990, where a fictional moon of Earth consists of a vast ocean cacophony of swirling stories mixing different colours. We've already met little eel or angry at the cursed fairy of yet demure tale little eel.

Um. She's trapped in a large lake and destined to be served up to the King for his dinner. The motif of powerful men eating and consuming the vulnerable bodies of children and women is, of course, very recurrent, one in the fairy tale tradition, and it's not coincidental that it emerges around the court of King Louis the 14th. This idea of a powerful man who's eating up his commonwealth, but she is saved, literally saved by the princess.

His eye is caught by the swirl of colour generated by little eel skin moving in the water. Little skin is skin which was very shiny, seemed golden in the sun in some places and in others mixed with different colours. Little girl embody the story as she generates it. She rewards the princess with a choice of gifts, and the girl chooses intelligence first. Pleased with this very wise choice, little L also confers great beauty and riches on the princess, and she's renamed Hebe.

He B falls in love with the prince called Artemia. But unbeknown to her, he's already been a suitor for the hand of her sister, Ellery. He b proves irresistible to Artemis with her many gifts. But just before the wedding, Hilary wins him back and the pair elope. Little L is summoned again by Hebe, and she whisks her favourite child away to the peaceful island on her magnificent ship, a ship covered in gold.

The masks were laid with a marvellous design. The sails were silver and rose coloured cloth and you could see written all over them. The word freedom, we're told. On the peaceful island he finds consolation. She forgets her love for Artemia, accepting calmly the courtship of the handsome prince who governs there. But she breaks Italy's injunction never to see Artemia again when she returns with her own prince to her father's kingdom.

Artemis has feelings of reignited. He duels with the Prince of the peaceful island. Sorry, folks. Spoiler here, and he loses his life at the hand of that prince. Thinking both of her suitors to be dead, he stabs herself. Little eel sadly heals the Prince of the peaceful island and returns to his kingdom, where he can forget Hebe.

Now, Little Eel is a striking figure in the story, and I think she's a figure of story, a swirl of shifting colours glimpsed beneath a reflective surface, a figure who has great power as well as being constrained by a destiny. She can't have self-control. She suggests the power of water, an element in which she can move freely but from which she cannot escape.

Little eel remains a presence in later fairy tale. See, for instance, Wilhelmina Pickering's lovely 1890 Adventures of Prince Ellesmere, one of my favourite childhood reads in this story a cruel mermaid, the Princess Andrada tries to win the love of an earthly prince, dragging him down to her watery kingdom, and he's saved only by the love of her fairy maid nella, who disguises herself as an eel and turns him into an eel himself.

So too so that they can swim to safety, and they've got the illustration made done by Wilhelmina Pickering's, um, lover.

Okay. Let's have a look at a, um. Brunelleschi and the Princess Maria are finally saved when they're lifted out of the water by a flock of seagulls seagulls, and they carried them on fishing nets to the shore. Every spirit, such as a seagull, then, are not so distant from their watery counterparts.

Marina Warner and the beast of the blonde reminds us that the sirens that lure sailors to the rocks in the Odyssey are flying bird women who transform in future versions to mermaids with their dangerous power of song and their physical loveliness. So these kind of airy spirits become sea spirits in later versions.

I put that to Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie, who uses the metaphor of the songbird to speak of a sense of destiny and romantic relationship, as she herself sings of a love at its highest moment of ecstasy, and the songbirds are singing like they know the score and the Oriental tale and Sufi traditions, including the verse of Rumi, the Nightingale or the bulbul, caged for its lovely song, serves as a metaphor for the soul struggling to escape the containment of the body.

For Keats, Coleridge and other romantic poets, Nightingale's voice, the power of poetry itself, beyond expressive language and pure song. Birds and creatures who navigate through air in the tradition of fairy, I think, serve to embody the spirit of the fairy tale itself. It's enchanting flights of fancy that transport us to different worlds that lift us away from our earthly properties.

1697 Merida, Illinois. In her country, Fey included a tale called Zula, or the Blue Bird, a version of Cinderella. The lovely first child named Florin of a King is cruelly treated by her stepmother, who seeks to promote her own daughter. Tweet on twit O, W, and E! Despite their attempts to conceal her, Florin attracts King Charming when he visits, the stepmother and Triton trick him into a loping retreat on Under Cover of darkness.

He thinks it's Florin. When he refuses to marry tweet on her fairy tutor. Zuko turns him into a blue bird for seven years. He manages to track Florin to her cell at the palace, and the two spend every night talking at her window. The bird brings Florian precious jewellery from his palace to express his love, but eventually the stepmother and treat him realise what's happened. The blue bird is savagely injured by glass placed around florins window, and he thinks that she has betrayed him.

An enchanter who raised charming finds him, heals him, and persuade him to agree to marriage, written in order to be restored to human form. Now it's florins turn to patient. You can't charm court charming when she comes in, disguised his kingdom, and finds a way of communicating her innocence to him and preventing his marriage to her stepsister. Donnelly had herself been the victim of a forced marriage to a brutal man, and she had undergone a very public divorce.

The moral to the tale suggest her transformation of her own story into the fairy tale, and her wish to see a regime that would allow her freedom. Better to be a bird of any hue. She says, in that moral. A raven, crow or an owl? I do protest, then stick for life to a partner like glue. Who scorns you or whom you detest? Too many matches of this sort.

I've seen and wish that now there was some king magician to stop these ill matched souls at once, and lean on them with force to keep his prohibition.

Have a look at us now. I'm still sticking, um, with, uh, uh, men forced to transform, um, slightly unusually, um, gnomes, trolls, nymphs, dryads, Gaia, Demeter. They're all spirits that have care of the Earth. Our environment, crops and cultivation, fairy rings, meadows, tree dwellings are familiar features of the fairy tale. Trees are spaces of hiding and of confinement. In the fairy and the folktale, think of Ariel, trapped in a tree by the witch acts in Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

Think of puck, another of Shakespeare's fairies, in a midsummer Night's Dream, who plays tricks on rural labourers and carries plant poisons and love potions across the globe to serve Oberon. Command the Earth is, I think, a very powerful sovereign in fairy tales, forcing those who inhabit it to cooperate with its cycles and patterns. Fairy style stories often remind us of our responsibility to tend to Earth's creations and support its cycles of growth and decay.

Roses are an especially powerful metaphor in literature for romantic attachment. Most often in fairy tales and fairy representations, they're associated with women rose Red and Snow White, the two lovely sisters born from parental wish. In the Grimm tales, the rose that beauty's father picks out of season that enslaves her to the beast. The wild Rose Fairy of Sicily, Barker's 1930 illustration.

You can see that now, 17th century, um, contemporary writer Catherine Bernhardt gives us an unusual male fairy associated with the rose in her 1696 story Prince Rosebush, which is inserted in a longer novel called Inés of Cordoba. We're introduced first to a princess. This one's called Florent, and she's cursed by a fairy the fairies carried to her mother in a tiny chariot just after the baby's birth, and Florent is cursed to fall in love with a lover whom she will not see.

The same fairies take care to present to the prince of a neighbouring kingdom, who's being kept away from the world a portrait of Flora. And when she's grown up, he meets the fairy as he's escaping from his rooms, and we next encounter him at the same time as Florent, in the shape of a rosebush influenced garden at her house in the country. One day, we're told, as she was walking around the flowerbeds, she saw a rose that was more verdant and had more flowers in the other.

It bent its little branches as she approached, and in its own way seemed to give her its approval. Things get more sinister, though. When she comes to near. She pricks her finger, drawing red blood, and the next morning she finds herself drawn back to the bush, which entangles her tightly, and, to her surprise, sighs in her ear.

The rosebush confides that the fairies obliged him to obtain the shape to gain access to Florent, and that he cannot convert back to his proper shape until his love is returned by the most beautiful person in the world. She was somewhat angry with toad that he had had the audacity to speak to her of love, but finally she forgave the lover in favour of the bush. How can one be angry at a rose bush? She asks. Bernard here turns the table on the use of the rose as a figure of love.

France is more in love with the bush than the boy, it appears. After his assiduous courtship, she confesses that she feels the same, and he's restored his true self. They're about to get married, and then Florence decides to test him because she doesn't know whether he knows true love because she's his first. So she sends him off to the island of youth. Uh, sure enough, on the Island of Youth, he's tempted by the 14 year old Queen of youth, but he's called back to his senses.

When Florence sends him a note. They she comes back. They're joyfully married, only for their union to prove unhappy, because he admits that he was attracted to the Queen of youth, and that prompts her jealousy. Finally, persecuted by her fury, he asks, we told the fairies to turn him back into a rosebush, which they did as a favour. For her part, jealous Florence has such a sensitive head she couldn't bear the scent of a flower that reminded her of her love.

Since that time, roses give people the vapours, we're told so here too, the story is about the power of story. We're in love with story, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale. But the tale itself warns against that infatuation and offers some hard headed insights into the true nature of lasting commitment. Like other similar stories, such as the animal fable, the fairy story also here reminds us of the incompatibility of species A rose is a rose, a human, it's a human.

The earth requires our care as humans, but it is not human.

Okay. My last element. Fire salamanders are the fairies Paracelsus associates with. Fire goblins are the creatures of the earth who make fire in its bowels and keep gold beneath its surface. A shunned subterranean race in Terry Pratchett's Disco World Series, fairies themselves are associated with fire.

Think of Tinkerbell image that's a little light flickering, but unlike the other elements fire, it's more often an agent in its own right, rather than an element inhabited by spirits or fairies or embodied by them. Um, and we might think here at the image of the history of fairy tales drawn by J.R.R. Tolkien, when he says they're a cauldron of story. This is 1939. He says it's a in a story which has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undated.

The fire that lures children into the witch's house is also where she keeps her cauldron to cook them. It's also the heart and the hearth of story around which audiences gather to hear fairy tales. So here's John Clare in the early 19th century, describing the children gathered round the fire at winter, listening to an old woman tell fairy tales thus tame the winter night regales with wonders, never ceasing tales while in a corner, ill at ease or crushing tween their father's knees.

The children are silent all the while, and in repressed laughter. Small quake with the ague chill. Chills of fear and tremble. Though they love to hear. And then we're told. Later. Still asleep. They secret to their pillows. Creep and whisper. Or in Terry's way, the prayers they dare no louder say. Then hide their heads beneath the clothes. And try in vain to seek repose. While yet to fancies sleepless I. Which is on the sheep trays galloped by. And fairies like a rising spark swarm.

Twittering round them in the dark. So the fairies recall the flames as they rise. And the children's dreams like rising sparks. The flames also imperil the children of the tales of the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were published in 1812. Most famously, of course, Hansel and Gretel, where Hansel is fattened up in preparation to be cooked and eaten by the witch. I think even more terrifying is the story of abuse and complicity told in The Juniper Tree, sometimes called the almond tree.

Does anyone know this tale? Some nods. So a woman cuts a finger while peeling an apple on a winter's day under a giant petri, where she's praying for a child as white as snow. And just red is blood. She dies giving birth and the father remarries, conceiving a daughter with his new wife. The boy's stepmother finds herself consumed by dislike. The boy, and in a fit of fury, she slams the lid of the apple box on his head as he reaches in to choose one and decapitates him.

She conceals the murder by chopping the body up and serving it to her husband as a stew. His morning sister, Marlena, collects up the discarded bones that have been sucked clean by the unknowing and hungry father, and she buries them in a silk shirt under the juniper tree. And then we're told, um. And now the juniper tree rustled and moved the branches, parted and joined, parted and joined as though they were clapping their hands with joy.

At the same time, smoke drifted out of the tree, and in the heart of the smoke there was a brightly burning fire. Then a wonderful bird flapped from the flames and began singing beautifully. He soared higher and higher into the air, and when he disappeared, the juniper tree was just as it was before. He had the threat of being turned into story, consumed as a story, boiled in a cauldron, a story and eaten. It's made kind of literal in the story.

So too the salamander or phoenix story of rebirth through flame is echoing here, and we have overtures of biblical resonance. Of course, the eating of the apple, the satanic temptation of the mother, the stepmother, the burning bush of religious vision sort of coexisting with folklore. The bird sings a beautiful song. Minamata. She killed me. My father. He ate me. My sister Marlena made certain to gather my bones all together.

And silk wrapped so nicely under the juniper tree. And the glory of the bird song wins it. Tokens a gold chain from a goldsmith, red shoes from a shoemaker, and a large millstone from a miller. The bird flies back to the juniper tree, where the father's heart is suddenly lifted after his grief at the sudden unexplained disappearance of his son.

But the stepmother complains, I'm so frightened that my teeth are rattling in my head, my blood's in flames in my veins, and she carries on using this language of being heated up from the inside, consumed by flames. Marlena weeps bitterly and expressed a desire to see the singing bird outside. The bird drops a gold chain around the neck of the father, the shoes at the feet of Marlena. The wife leaps to her feet and her hair flared and crackled like the flames of [INAUDIBLE] as she runs outside,

and the bird throws the millstone on her head and crushes her. The newly made family go inside to eat. In this tale, fire burns and redeems as well as providing heat to prepare food. The story also, of course, interestingly brings together elements in a kind of melting pot of story not only fire, but the earth in the shape of the juniper tree, the air in the bird, and its flight in song.

So let's take a breath, put our pens down and think where we've landed. Fairy tales do this very often. Poe and Donnelly finish tales with a moral that brings us back to earth, explaining what the prosaic and everyday conclusion is that we can draw from the enchanted and enchanting tale we've just been in.

Claire Pollard's heroine, Marie Donnelly, a kind of fictionalised version of the real life doyen of the salons, is described as turning to writing when she was a teenager, abused by her father and then forced into an unhappy marriage with a much older and violent man. Man hotels are a place of escape for her, but they're also a place to write out or put that abuse into another form.

This is Claire Pollard saying of Marie Donnelly the pen is a magic wand she can tap and a door somewhere else appears. So we've seen the violence and familial conflict in fairy tales that sits alongside the magic that sometimes offers freedom, but also sometimes locked in its own inevitable destiny. Perhaps our best conclusion is that fairy tales give us a formal representation of metamorphosis itself, turning one thing into another with the pen or the voice.

Opening doors to other ways of being. These can be dark and dangerous, as well as shimmering prospects of alternative forms of life. Choosing to immerse yourself in these worlds as a writer and a reader is to open yourself to change, even when you feel powerless to affect it in your own present life. And this is probably their enduring appeal for children and adults alike. I hope what I've said here makes you want to read on and read more in fairy tales, or write them yourselves.

Um, and to that end, I've provided a reading list in the PowerPoint for you. Um, you've just seen the the first one, which is a sort of a list of anthologies and key modern works you could look into. The second page gives you 17th century French, uh, information about 17th and 18th and 19th century work. And my last page, um, some key critical works that you might want to consult. Thank you. Thank you.

That was brilliant. In fact, we probably are going to have to huddle here for the microphone for now. So we'll take it in turns because I don't think the roaming mic is working very well. So I'm going to you've actually left us a very nice chunk of time for questions.

I'm going to keep an eye on it on my phone here and at some I think I'm going just before half post, I'm going to say we might have time for another question, but if anyone wants a comfort break, go now because the next talk will also be in an hour slot.

Um, do we have a question from the room to begin with? A lot of the examples that you mentioned were written by women or surrounding particularly feminine themes. I was wondering if there's a particular reason why you think fairy tales can kind of relate to the feminine experience, or perhaps if there were any other bits that appeal more to masculinity? Yeah. Well, I'm I think that there's a kind of, um, there are two ways that you can come at this.

One of them is a sort of historical sort of generic story, which is, I suppose, to sort of say in the late 17th century in France, there's a big debate going on between sort of, um, modern literature, the moderns and the ancients, how it's described. And I suppose, uh, pepo is an advocate, a male writer, but he's an advocate of the modern, um, and the modern is often being associated with the feminine against the kind of masculine authority which is a classical tradition,

um, associated with masculine voice. So I think there's a way in which the kind of clever, witty tale telling of the fairy tale that's being set up as an alternative form of literary tradition that could challenge those ancient training in classical literatures that are associated with men. So I think there's a kind of historical story that I think there's also a probably a sociological one.

Um, and various critics. Marina Warner, um, Dan Perkins as well talked about this, um, sort of idea that that actually, um, the kind of scenario of the stepmother is not an uncommon one in, um, folk life or in sort of in the lives of people of this period, so that, um, and the sort of sense of, of women's precarity, um, in these environments, social environments is quite powerfully communicated in the towns.

But there are also ways of working through those anxieties about your own precariousness as a woman being attached to a family that might cast you out or might call you out as a witch. Um, so I think there's a sort of historical story there of witches and parents and women. Um, I suppose I also, um. I of I, I guess I am also. As you can hear in me deciding to talk about the elements a bit wedded to a more kind of archetypal sense of fairy tales.

The idea that these are stories in which kind of feminine and masculine forces are often being pitted against each other, not necessarily in traditional way. So the elements are being associated with or being gendered quite powerfully in ways that sort of resonate with us as readers. So I think I don't want to say it's all kind of explained by historical courses. I think that's ways in which our imagination tends to want to organise things by differentiating categories.

And one of the most powerful organising categories in our culture is gender.

So yeah. Um, we've had one question that's asked, um, if you could talk a little about the nuance between a fairy tale and the realm of fairies, and if you speak about that, that's interesting. Do you know how much? I mean, I think I am. As you can probably hear, I am very interested in the history of narrative and and also in kind of long serial narratives. Uh, I really like embedded fairy tales.

So moments when realist fiction, if you like to parts into the fairy tale, is probably why I find Claire Pollard's modern fairy is very interesting, because it's a sort of a it is a it's a romance story about the 17th century salons in which fairy tales are told and sort of punctuates that, um, larger story. Um, so I which is why whereas I suppose the world of fairy, you know, like it's much more, um, perhaps it's more the world of folklore.

It doesn't necessarily unfold in tales. It can also be kind of elemental, present. Um, and I suppose I think in some ways that world of fairies is sometimes not best captured in the fairy tale. I've just been raving to keep about a wonderful, uh, new collection of poems by a poet called Fiona Benton called mitten, which just come out this year. And I think the kind of the lyric poem sometimes can be a great place to capture the kind of spirit of fairy without.

Obliging that figure to fit into a narrative and perform a functional narrative. She has a wonderful poem about Robin Goodfellow, which is just about imagining that his sort of materiality, his tufting, is his kind of this orderliness without making it fit a narrative structure.

Um. So. And I suppose there is in fairy tale, there is a strong propulsion towards narrative conclusion which can kind of push against that sense of fairies resisting order that they're there, this orderliness, which might be better captured by visual arts or by poetry.

I, um. I wondered if I could ask. So a lot of the examples definitely, that I've come across and that came up in the lecture are quite, um, quite dark and violent. And I wondered if you had any thoughts about why there seems to be so much kind of grisly, so many grisly elements of fairy tales. Well, I suppose that's one of the reasons I gave you John Clare, because I think he is capturing the fact that, you know, even the small children we like.

The violent, the grisly. You know, we like to be scared. I mean, we like that sense of threat. Perhaps also a sense of threat averted or put somewhere else. So it's not to present to us. I guess that's why I finished on that quotation around Mary Donnelly as well. Sort of. It's a way of experiencing threat. In a displaced way. That's that's kind of the power of fantasy, I suppose. I'm sure that's recurred in lots of these lectures and discussions today.

Um, I do think that's perhaps why I wanted to start with talking about metaphor and metamorphosis, because I suppose I think the kind of apparent sort of facticity of the fairy tale, it's matter of fact, this kind of, um, it's one of its most interesting characteristics, so that, you know, the father eats the cooked boy.

And I'm sort of then turning that into metaphor and saying, we might be consumed by a story or we might consume the story, but but I kind of I think there's a way in which there's both a kind of invitation to think metaphorically about the tale, but also to experience the tale on a very material basis, on a very physical and embodied basis. And I find that really interesting. I think it's quite a difficult thing for literary.

Writing to achieve, and I think fairy do it very well, that you can hold the metaphorical and the material and the figurative in the material, in the same mental space. Um, okay, so I've got one that says, um, what do you think about the continuing impact of fairy tales in modern culture? Um, and where meaning is often found beyond the original one that was intended? Good question. Um. What do I think about the continuing impact?

I suppose in some ways, sometimes I'm a bit disappointed by the way that fairy tale features in contemporary representation, that it feels as though it's often being kind of invoked as some sort of, uh, I don't know, sort of ancient memory or something lost or in the past, um, that when it's modernised. Hmm. I used to love. I still do love feminist fairy tale. Actually, I like that sort of twisting. But I suppose I think that also conceals the fact that the tales themselves were quite feminist.

Said that the way in which often modernising things makes it sound as though those things had no radical potential in them in the first place, and that you've got to do something to them. I think that's all in there in those original tales. So I don't think that's again, I don't want to tell a simple tale of kind of, you know, regressive fairy tales. And now we've got this kind of progressive world where we've got to rewrite them. Um, I quite like fairy elements when they enter, but I'm.

I'm huge. I'm fascinated by historical drama. Um, so I've kind of been I spent much too much of one sabbatical watching all of Outlander, and I thought, I like that mix of the fairy, the witch, and the kind of, um, a time travel story. And Outlander, I think is quite intelligent. And I think it's I also think it's a kind of miracle of modern marketing.

It's kind of making a kind of television series for women that has all of the kind of military historical bluster, bluff and bluster that that people associate with that kind of series. So I think it's kind of well done. Uh, I like the fact that it it mixes the magical and also that it makes modern science magical. The fact that she's a nurse and then a later surgeon. So when she goes back in time, she's bringing these kind of modern surgical methods back.

And people think she was a witch. And in a way, some of the things that we, um, allocate to the agency of fairy, uh, historically may be things that are in fact scientific discovery or changes in the way we think. Um, yeah. Um, there are a couple. There are a couple here with, like, you're kind of asking your opinion on a quote by an author. Um, uh, that could maybe be asked quickly also.

Um, do you agree with C.S. Lewis as, quote, someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. Um hmm. That's good. Oh, goodness. That's a really interesting. I mean, I guess it's part of that sort of sense of ancient wisdom, isn't it? It's the same sort of notion that fairy tales carry some kind of ancient wisdom that we, um, I don't I don't think fairy tales are wasted on children. Actually, uh, would be a another answer that I would have.

Um, I think I think they are really important for adults as well. And that's why I really enjoy that 17th century tradition, because it is in some ways an adult tradition. And, um, but but I but I also think, yeah, all children should be introduced to fairy. They're not lies. They're a way of understanding what fiction is. I would say, um, and and perhaps understanding the difference between lies and fiction.

It's in the form. In which case I think we should thank Rose once again for her amazing lecture. Thank you.