Using Fairy Tales

Vasilisa at the hut of Baba Yaga by Ivan Bilibin

My new poetry collection Something In Nothing includes this endpiece:

Something In Nothing uses fairy tales as a means of talking about dark matters in a safe way. This is after all what fairytales have always done – stories about not taking sweets (or gingerbread) from strangers, about child neglect and worse.

I grew up on fairy tales, having worked my way through all Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books in my local library and watched avidly the BBC’s Tales from Europe, a collection of filmed fairy tales for children from mainland Europe.  So I was surprised by how many people do not know the tales that I reference in Something in Nothing.

Maybe I should not be surprised – fairy tales in the English-speaking world are often seen as being for children. They most certainly are not, or not exclusively so. Some, like that of the murderous Bluebeard, are not suited to small children.

If you wish to read the fairytales that I have used in Something In Nothing then you could do worse than to start as I did with Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, which is out of

copyright and therefore available free on the web. There you will find Bluebeard, Beauty and Beast, Hansel and Gretel, and many other tales. Bear in mind however that these stories are only one man’s telling and aimed primarily at children. There are countless versions of the tales, as many as there are tellers. None can be said to be the “right” one and yet they all have some inherent truth. That is the joy of them for me as a reader and as a writer.

The Slavic witch Baba Yaga is not to be found in the Blue Fairy Book. She features in so many stories from Eastern Europe that it is impossible to suggest just one. She is a very complex character and I fail to do that complexity justice in the collection, instead focusing on her insatiable consumption of human flesh, with a brief reference to her role as a former goddess who stood at the entrance to death.

The study of fairy tales is a lifetime’s work and not one I have undertaken. But if this short post has whetted your interest, you will find more of my thoughts on fairytales and other ideas behind the collection, appearing on this blog over the next months.