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Some reviewers of the first episodes of the current BBC1 adaptation have dismissed it is over-blown fantasy, even childish, yet Clarke’s characters are only once removed from the very real magical world of early nineteenth-century England. What few readers or viewers realise is that there were magicians similar to Strange and Norrell at the time: there really were 'Friends of English Magic', to whom the novel’s Mr Segundus appealed in a letter to The Times.

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There is a quarrel inside me about fairies, and the form of literature their presence helps to define. I have never tried to see a fairy, or at least not since I was five years old. The interest of Casimiro Piccolo reveals how attitudes to folklore belong to their time: he was affected by the scientific inquiry into the paranormal which flourished – in highly intellectual circles – from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. But he also presents a test case, I feel, for the questions that hang around fairies and fairy tales in the twenty-first century. What is the point of them? What are the uses of such enchantments today? The absurdity of this form of magical belief (religious miracles are felt to be different, and not only by believers) creates a quarrel inside me, about the worth of this form of literature and entertainment I enjoy so much. In what way am I ‘away with the fairies’, too?

Suspicion now hangs around fairy tales because the kind of supernatural creatures and events they include belong to a belief system nobody subscribes to anymore. Even children, unless very small, are in on the secret that fairyland is a fantasy. In the past, however, allusions to fairies could be dangerous not because belief in them was scorned, but because they were feared: Kirk collected the beliefs of his flock in order to defend them against charges of heterodoxy or witchcraft, and, the same time as Kirk’s ethnographical activities, Charles Perrault published his crucially influential collection (l697), in which he pokes fun, with suave courtly wit, at the dangerousness of witches and witchcraft, ogres and talking animals. Perrault is slippery and ambiguous. His Cinderella is a tale of marvellously efficacious magic, but he ends with a moral: recommending his readers to find themselves well-placed godmothers. Not long before he was writing his fairy tales, France and other places in Europe had seen many people condemned to death on suspicion of using magic. The fairy tale emerges as entertainment in a proto-enlightenment move to show that there is nothing to fear.

The current state of fairy tale – whether metastasized in huge blockbuster films or refreshed and re-invigorated in the fiction of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Margaret Atwood or, most recently, Helen Oyeyemi (Mr Fox, and, this year, Boy Snow Bird) does not invite, let alone compel, belief in its magic elements as from an audience of adepts or faithful. Contemporary readers and audiences, including children over the age of 6, are too savvy about special effects and plot lines and the science/magic overlap to accept supernatural causes behind Angelina Jolie’s soaring in Maleficent or the transmogrifications of the characters. Nor do they, nor do we need to suspend disbelief in the willed way Coleridge described.

Rather the ways of approaching the old material – Blue Beard, The Robber Bridegroom, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White and so on – opens up the stories to new meanings. The familiar narrative becomes the arena for raising questions; the story’s well known features provide a common language for thinking about families and love, childhood and marriage. Fairies and their realm allow thought experiments about alternative arrangements in this world. We are no longer looking for fairies at the bottom of the garden, but seeing through them to glimpse other things. As the little girl realises in The Servant’s Tale by Paula Fox, her grandmother through her stories ‘saw what others couldn’t see, that for her the meaning of one thing could also be the meaning of a greater thing.’ In the past, these other, greater things were most often promises – escape, revenge, recognition, glory – but the trend of fairy tales is turning darker, and many retellings no longer hold out such bright eyed hope.

Featured image credit: Sleeping Beauty, by Viktor M. Vasnetsov. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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I've posted about epigrams before, including this one by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

But I was feeling the need for something short and to the point today, so epigrams seem just the thing. An epigram need not rhyme, although poetic ones often do. An epigram is a short, clever, usually witty statement that is memorable. Here is an epigram from Benjamin Franklin, writing as Poor Richard:

Early to bed and early to rise
makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise

Franklin used repetition (early to), internal rhyme (healthy and wealthy) and alliteration (wealthy and wise) as well as end-rhyme, virtually guaranteeing that this would be memorable after only one hearing.

For those of you who read Latin, here's quite an old one:

Admiror, O paries, te non cecidisse ruinis
qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.

For those of you who don't read Latin, here's a translation: "I'm astonished, wall, that you haven't collapsed into ruins,/since you're holding up the weary verse of so many poets." Funny, yes?

William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" is composed almost entirely of phrases that can be pulled out as epigrams.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider said these, the first four lines of the poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Hannibal Lecter quoted the next two lines in Red Dragon:

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

Small sentences, small words - but mighty in their content and staying power.

Got a favorite epigram?

If the UN can have a goodwill ambassador, then why not children's literature? In a super-cool move, The Library of Congress has appointed Children's Author Jon Scieszka as the first National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. He doesn't have the status of Children's Laureate, a title which is used in the UK. But he will spend the next two years stumping for reading. The LC have made a great choice. His off-beat sense of humor, and his dedication to keep boys reading in particular(check out his Guys Read site) works in his favor. Scieszka understands that an emphasis needs to be placed on reading as much as on books. Not every kid wants to read War and Peace (Yes! I was the exception!) But most kids want to have fun. Scieszka wants to connect kids with fun things to read. All the power to him.

Some Scieszka faves:

Cowboy and Octopus (a NJFK Book of the Week)
The Time Warp Trio series (a great choice for kids looking to move away from Captain Underpants)
Seen Art?
The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales