The Truth in Fairy Tales and Fables

By Carol Woolum Roberts

Last Friday Paul and I began our Artists in Residence program at Canyon Elementary School.  This year we will be meeting with students every Friday school is in session, from January until the first week in April, when they will have their final performance.

This year each class will do their own presentation.  Each class will perform five kinds of stories:

1.  Aesop’s Fable
2.  Animal Tale
3.  Cumulative Tale
4.  Fairy Tale
5.  Tale from Another Country

As we talked to students from Kindergarten through Fifth Grade last week, Paul explained to them about the five types of stories they would be telling.

In almost every class there was a student who, when asked to describe what a Fairy Tale was, said, “It isn’t true.”

I am not sure this is the correct response about a Fairy Tale.

Because all the stories we are having the students tell do share truth.

The first time I read someone very adamant about this truth was in one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote the book “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”. In one part of the book, L’Engle talks about how Jesus used stories to share truth with people. She learned about life from reading and writing stories as a young child. Some of these stories were fairy tales and myths. But she found out that some people did not think these kinds of stories were important to read. She writes:

And yet we are still being taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand “reality.” I received a disturbed and angry letter from a young mother who told me that a friend of hers, with young children, gave them only instructive books; she wasn’t going to allow their minds to be polluted with fairy tales. They were going to be taught the “real” world. This attitude is a victory for the powers of this world. A friend of mine, a fine storyteller, remarked to me, “Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.” Yes. God who told stories.

She quoted Clyde Kilby, an American writer and professor who studied the works of J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis.  In her book, Kilby is quoted as saying:

 “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything….It is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.”

In continuing to write about mothers keeping their children from fairy tales, L’Engle writes, “The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.

When I was a child, reading Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, reading about Joseph and his coat of many colours and his infuriating bragging about his dreams, reading The Selfish Giant and The Book of Jonah, these diverse stories spoke to me in the same language, and I knew intuitively that they belonged to the same world.”

I am in total agreement with L’Engle and her thoughts. Stories help us understand the world. God uses stories, not just in the Bible, but those passed down from generation to generation to help us learn more about what it is to be human. And to love and understand other humans.

Paul and I get this awesome opportunity to help the students at Canyon Elementary to tell these stories that teach these truths.

We are also helping our after-school students write some stories of their own.

Writing and telling stories helps us be creative.

L’Engle writes this about those who Create:

We are to be in this world as healers, as listeners, and as servants. In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars. We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story or the painting or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.”

Children are creative, and they love to play.  They teach us so much about the creative process, and we are so excited to spend these next few months creating with the Canyon Elementary students.

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What is one of your favorite fairy tales growing up?  What does it teach you today?

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