Introduction
I didn’t like fairy tales when I was a child. No. I had a
scratched LP (yes, that’s how old I am) that contained
several tales of the Brothers Grimm. I definitely recall
Cinderella. Then there was the terrifying Goose Maid,
with the chopped-off talking head of Falada, the faithful
horse (utterly traumatizing), King Thrushbeard, The
Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, The Wolf and the Seven
Goatlings… I grew up in Germany, so the narrator read the
original tales—abbreviated, I am sure, but not censored
or modified to make them more digestible for children.
I therefore knew the darker versions by heart before I
encountered the interpretations of Walt Disney or the
light-hearted Czech movie adaptations I learnt to love.
All that darkness was of course deeply troubling,
but as the tales were both bewildering and strangely
unforgettable, I listened to that LP almost every night in
my bed, over and over again. It taught me how strange
an enchantment fairy tales can cast even though the
characters stay rather abstract and the plot takes the
wildest and often very abrupt twists and turns. Fairy tales
break all the rules of a good story and yet they find such
powerful images for the deepest human emotions and
fears that we sense deep layers of meaning in a poisonous
apple or the gruelling setting of a gingerbread house,
and more truth than a thousand words would grant.
Of course, that’s an explanation I came up with much
later for the lure of the scratchy LP. As a child I didn’t
ask myself what cast the spell. We accept the rules of
enchanted lands much more easily when we are young.
Apart from the Grimm’s LP, I also remember a
book of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales bound in blue
linen, a pale green volume of animal tales that I still
own. In some of those stories I felt more at home than
in The Grimm’s Tales, maybe because their tone was
more familiar and less distant in time. I didn’t know
yet about the difference between folk tales passed on
by nameless storytellers over the ages and fairy tales
created by modern authors like H.C. Andersen, Oscar
Wilde or Rudyard Kipling (it doesn’t get much better
than Just So Stories).
Nevertheless. The dark tales the Grimms had collected,
though so much older than The Ugly Duckling
or The Happy Prince, stayed with me, along with their
mysterious and powerful imagery, their archetypes and
the magic of rose-covered castles and shoes filled with
blood… which sometimes included a cut-off toe. But
I probably still would’ve shaken my head in disbelief
at the age of thirty if someone had told me that one
day I’d own quite a collection of fairy-tale books, and I
probably would’ve accepted any bet that I’d never make
them a vital part of my own writing. Even when I was
reading and rereading tales from all over the world for
this anthology, I often felt again what I felt as my sixyear-
old self: that I don’t really like fairy tales.
Oh, all those helpless princesses and scheming old
women, all those child-eating witches and stepmothers!
Does any literary mirror reflect more unflinchingly,
how cruelly women are judged and vilified when they
rebel against the parts men want them to play? All over
the world, fairy tales describe the golden cages and the
punishment for the women who try to escape them.
Of course, in most cases the only hope for the heroine
is the timely appearance of the prince. Folk and fairy
tales tend to be quite reactionary. They don’t even try
to hide their purpose of confirming and preserving
the values of patriarchal societies, with their strict
hierarchies anchored by property and armed violence.
But from time to time one comes across a tale with
a slightly more rebellious message, and each time I
discover one of those I wonder whether many others
were forgotten exactly because they don’t reaffirm
the traditional values that even the liberal Grimms
believed in.
Copyright © 2019 by Cornelia Funke. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
