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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Um, welcome back everyone. Um, sorry to interrupt your conversations.

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We'll make a shift. I hope you have all sorted yourselves and relieved yourselves to your satisfaction.

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Um. It gives me immense pleasure to chair this next two talks.

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Um, we've got an absolute treat lined up for you personally as a fairy tale nerd.

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I can't wait to hear these.

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So, first, without further ado, Professor Ross Baluster, who is a fellow at Mansfield College and an expert in 18th century,

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does an awful lot of amazing work in women's writing and is also a British Academy fellow.

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So without further ado, I won't over speak about what Rose is going to speak about.

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I'll just let her deliver. Thank you very much for having me. Okay.

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Hello. Great.

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Thank you. So thanks so much for being here to hear me talk, um, about the enchantment of a fairy tale.

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Um, I hope I can be almost as interesting or capture your attention and the way that fairy tales have held my attention for.

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Oh, I think probably about 40 years. Um, so let me see if this works here.

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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.

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And I'm going to go on to offer some definitions of the word fairy and talk about the distinction between folk and fairy.

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Um. Um, and then I'm going to move on to talk about elements of and in the fairy tale,

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giving you some examples from fairy tales of the importance of those primary elements water, air,

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earth and fire as forms of metamorphic power that drive the plot and also represent the power

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of fairy tales that that kind of power that fairy tales exercised over auditors and readers.

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So let's start with how do we define the fairy tale?

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Let me propose that we think of fairy tale as the story of Metamorphoses from the Greek metaphor change and morph form.

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Appropriately enough,

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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.

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So the example I've taken from is from the most recent,

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and I think and have a wildly successful collection of tales from the novelist Clare Pollard in 2024.

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Has anyone read The Modern Fairies yet? It's wonderful.

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Please just go and read it. It's fantastic work of short fiction.

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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.

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So their first metamorphoses, if you like, from spoken tales delivered by nurses to their young charges,

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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.

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So here's Claire Pollard. This is a telephone. Quiet.

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Henrietta Murray again begins, rehearsed and fluent.

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Now, to whatever greatness destiny may elevate those it favours.

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I think we all agree. There's no escape in this world from sorrow.

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Even fairies themselves have a burden to endure.

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Did you know that these creatures have a misfortune of being compelled to change their shape a few days in every lunar month?

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It's true. They become their animal selves, whether that beast is celestial, terrestrial or aquatic.

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So it was that at her time of the month, the fairy unquiet found that she transformed into a thick,

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slick, muscular eel whose skin glistened with a rainbow.

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Now only eight.

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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.

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Her first collection was published in 1698, after she was exiled from the French court in 1694.

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Um, she was exiled because she published a satirical pamphlet about the king Louis the 14th and his mistress Madame de Manzano.

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Among the many metamorphoses of the fairy tale is its couching in this way of a

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kind of political critique in the form of a fantastic tale about other worlds,

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which is what it's doing when we think of the familiar plots of fairy tales Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel.

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They often concern transformations brought about by fairies.

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Those whimsical, sometimes bad tempered beings who inflict changes on humans or animals into different forms.

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Waking to sleeping from a mouse to a coachman. From a prince to a bird or a frog.

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But here the story that Maura's telling, it's a story about forced transformation of a fairy.

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When a fairy has her period, she must become an ill.

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That's the French word on yet another example.

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Marina Warner invites us to think about the transformation, which isn't really improvement or reform or change,

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but rather a kind of pleasurable repetition that enables us to keep inhabiting the space of story.

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In this description, that she gives in her little critical introduction to the genre of fairy tale.

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She says, think of the fairy tale as a plant genus, like roses or fungi or grasses,

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which seed and root and flower here in their changing species, and colour and size and shape where they spring.

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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.

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The story's interest, she says, isn't exhausted by repetition, reformulation, or retelling.

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But there pleasure gains from the endless permutations performed on the nucleus of the tale, its DNA as it were.

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Now, Warner here uses two metaphors to describe the fairy tale a metaphor.

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Back to my metaphor is a figure of speech where one thing stands for another.

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So he asks us to think of the fairy tale as a plant, which changes on every instance that it recedes and is planted.

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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.

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She tells us there's a nucleus to the story on which there are permutation permutations.

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When it appears again, we might call that nucleus the plot.

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It might be embellished differently by different speakers, but it has a core, a nucleus that survives and is still recognisable.

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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.

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She herself says in this same short history of fairy tales, she says the fairy tales characteristic manner is matter of fact.

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Fairy tales are one dimensional, depth less abstract and sparse.

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They're not, she says, ornate and metaphorical. They sit, she says.

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They tell the tale as it is. No more, no less.

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Different audiences, different historical moments of reception,

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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.

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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.

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They can also go backwards as well as forwards. Let's look a little deeper into the name fairy tale.

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Or as I told you earlier, it was termed by the French tellers who established it as a genre in the later 17th century.

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The context say this helps us, I think, to understand a little better the sense of a story with a destiny,

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a destination, but an infinite capacity to change and transform.

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So Marina Warner, who is I think the finest historian of the fairy tale, tells us in her first book on the subject,

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From the Beast to the blonde, that the etymology of the word fairy derives from fata, Latin feminine word fata.

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It's a rare variant form of Thar tome, fate, the goddess of destiny.

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Forthem also, she tells us, means that which is spoken, so that all relatives already written into that use of the word.

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The verb fari to speak gives French fe, Italian fata, Spanish hadar, all of which mean fairy.

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We might think to, she says of the classical fates,

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three women who spin threads of the future on a spindle who are metamorphosed into fairies in later versions, uh, post classical versions.

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And those fairies, of course, perform fateful roles in the stories of humans.

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As Byatt, contemporary novelist, talks about her decline in interest in the long form of the novel in the 1980s and her

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sense of the pleasure of experimenting with short forms and set stories which manifested,

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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.

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She is, though, talking about her novel possession,

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and she describes writing a version of that fairy tale and in which a man chooses between three women,

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putting it as an inset story in that novel possession.

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She says the pleasure of writing it was in handling the old worn counters of the characterless persons, the fate of the consecutive events,

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including the helpless commentary of the writer on the unavoidable grip of the story,

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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.

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I like the idea of the writer slipping in the unavoidable grip of story rather than story gripping readers necessarily.

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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.

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Fairies, then, are both predictors of fate and in the grip of stories that determine their fate.

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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.

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I want to differentiate a bit fairy tale from folklore.

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Scholars distinguish between folktales using the German word machen, which associate strongly with place and are not signed and dated,

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and literary fairy tales, custom hidden in German, which are an art form transmitted increasingly through print and commercial forms,

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coming from the spoken word of salon and parlour games, and departing from the unlettered ness of the folk or people,

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while claiming to derive from the spoken word bird shells, Paros shells.

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Pecos Tales can't speak in the 17th century came to be known as the Tales of Mother Goose,

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suggesting this bridge between the oral tradition of unlettered tale tellers entering the salon cultures of the educated.

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So if you look at these two early 18th century images of a female tale teller and her audience,

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on one side you have a frontispiece from a 1729 edition of Charles Paros Tales,

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with Mother Goose spinning and telling her tales to a seated audience by the hearth.

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On the other side, you have a frontispiece from the 1725 edition of Marie Donnelly's collection, which shows a privileged lady.

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Interestingly, her hand is also held high, as is Mother Goose's,

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but she's mid-performance in her salon, delivering her tale to an enraptured aristocratic audience.

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Paho and Donnelly were both composing in the later 17th century,

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and the two traditions are sitting side by side with each other, rather than one metamorphosing into the other.

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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.

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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.

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In both cases, the audience, you'll notice, are not necessarily depicted as children.

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Might be small by comparison, but they're not necessarily children.

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What marks them is their attention rather than their age.

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What I would say here is that both fairy and folk,

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I think a ways of thinking about futurity and thinking about narrative outside of the twin forces of a Christian providential ism,

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that providential wisdom that insists that God scripts our future.

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And a classical mythology.

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Another kind of theological drive that also insists on powerful and distant, primarily masculine authority driving human history.

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The spirits of place that are found in these narrative traditions.

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Folk and fairy are local. They're intimate that secular.

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They're attached to place and person. They facilitate the transition to the modern while retaining connection to the past.

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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.

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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.

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Fairies were also theorised by Paracelsus through the elements in his book on nymphs, sylphs, pygmies, and Salamanders,

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The Four Kinds of Fairy, and he associates them with the four elements theorised by cosmologist and poet and pedigrees.

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Uh fifth century before Christ as the primary basis of all matter water, air, earth and fire.

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It might be worth just stopping to note here that fairies often seem to generate a

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kind of sense of categorisation and listing that when people talk about fairies,

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I seem to start listing. I think of, um, a book that enchanted me.

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A series of books that enchanted me when I was younger. The Flower Fairies of Sicily, Mary Barker, um, in the 1920s.

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So in the rest of this lecture, I'm going to explore the sense that fairy tales consist of elements that metamorphose,

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that they're tales of metamorphosis, chosen or forced.

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And I'm going to concentrate on the earliest examples of the genre of the fairy, sometimes also termed the one detail.

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The 17th century French tradition.

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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.

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In doing this, I don't want to suggest a story of progressive advance or even coherent development here.

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Rather, I want to pay attention to the metamorphic powers of the fairy tale, its preoccupation with change from one form to another,

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which can be set to progressive or conservative ends, to rebel against power, or to reassert powers authority.

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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,

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our responsibilities for mutual care of our environment, and care for the environment so we can hear the traditions.

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I think of fairy stories resonating in modern fictions of climate disaster and potential salvation,

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in imagining the voices of spirits speaking for and behalf of elements that are under threat,

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such as earth, air and water, or through the ignition of our planet as a result of global warming.

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The tales I've selected here are in a tradition in which humans or fairies are forced to transform into another element,

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and then strive to speak from the prison of this new materiality and to call out the abuse of power that's

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confined them and put at risk the balance of the elements and the powers of our everyday forms of life and being.

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Um, I realise I haven't put, um. Okay.

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That's helpful to watch with me. So thank you.

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Shout out to me. Okay. So let's start with water. Um Yamaha Yoruba anfitriao from the Greek.

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Saraswati from the Hindu. So, uh, Celtic.

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Nix's Germanic and Scandinavian. These are all ocean and freshwater spirits, powerful goddesses,

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mermaids with the power to lure sailors and land dwellers through their song to their own drowning.

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Water is the element of Fantastic Tales, an entire alternative universe populated by sea beings whose lives mirror our own,

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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,

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where a fictional moon of Earth consists of a vast ocean cacophony of swirling stories mixing different colours.

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We've already met little eel or angry at the cursed fairy of yet demure tale little eel.

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Um. She's trapped in a large lake and destined to be served up to the King for his dinner.

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The motif of powerful men eating and consuming the vulnerable bodies of children and women is, of course, very recurrent,

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one in the fairy tale tradition, and it's not coincidental that it emerges around the court of King Louis the 14th.

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This idea of a powerful man who's eating up his commonwealth, but she is saved, literally saved by the princess.

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His eye is caught by the swirl of colour generated by little eel skin moving in the water.

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Little skin is skin which was very shiny, seemed golden in the sun in some places and in others mixed with different colours.

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Little girl embody the story as she generates it.

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She rewards the princess with a choice of gifts, and the girl chooses intelligence first.

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Pleased with this very wise choice, little L also confers great beauty and riches on the princess, and she's renamed Hebe.

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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.

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He b proves irresistible to Artemis with her many gifts.

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But just before the wedding, Hilary wins him back and the pair elope.

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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.

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The masks were laid with a marvellous design. The sails were silver and rose coloured cloth and you could see written all over them.

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The word freedom, we're told. On the peaceful island he finds consolation.

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She forgets her love for Artemia, accepting calmly the courtship of the handsome prince who governs there.

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But she breaks Italy's injunction never to see Artemia again when she returns with her own prince to her father's kingdom.

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Artemis has feelings of reignited. He duels with the Prince of the peaceful island.

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Sorry, folks. Spoiler here, and he loses his life at the hand of that prince.

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Thinking both of her suitors to be dead, he stabs herself.

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Little eel sadly heals the Prince of the peaceful island and returns to his kingdom, where he can forget Hebe.

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Now, Little Eel is a striking figure in the story, and I think she's a figure of story,

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a swirl of shifting colours glimpsed beneath a reflective surface, a figure who has great power as well as being constrained by a destiny.

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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.

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Little eel remains a presence in later fairy tale. See, for instance, Wilhelmina Pickering's lovely 1890 Adventures of Prince Ellesmere,

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one of my favourite childhood reads in this story a cruel mermaid, the Princess Andrada tries to win the love of an earthly prince,

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dragging him down to her watery kingdom, and he's saved only by the love of her fairy maid nella,

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who disguises herself as an eel and turns him into an eel himself.

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

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Okay. Let's have a look at a, um.

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Brunelleschi and the Princess Maria are finally saved when they're lifted out of the water by a flock of seagulls seagulls,

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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.

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Marina Warner and the beast of the blonde reminds us that the sirens that lure sailors to the rocks in the Odyssey are flying

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bird women who transform in future versions to mermaids with their dangerous power of song and their physical loveliness.

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So these kind of airy spirits become sea spirits in later versions.

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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,

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as she herself sings of a love at its highest moment of ecstasy,

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and the songbirds are singing like they know the score and the Oriental tale and Sufi traditions, including the verse of Rumi,

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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.

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For Keats, Coleridge and other romantic poets, Nightingale's voice, the power of poetry itself, beyond expressive language and pure song.

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Birds and creatures who navigate through air in the tradition of fairy, I think, serve to embody the spirit of the fairy tale itself.

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It's enchanting flights of fancy that transport us to different worlds that lift us away from our earthly properties.

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1697 Merida, Illinois. In her country, Fey included a tale called Zula, or the Blue Bird, a version of Cinderella.

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The lovely first child named Florin of a King is cruelly treated by her stepmother, who seeks to promote her own daughter.

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Tweet on twit O, W, and E!

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Despite their attempts to conceal her, Florin attracts King Charming when he visits,

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the stepmother and Triton trick him into a loping retreat on Under Cover of darkness.

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He thinks it's Florin. When he refuses to marry tweet on her fairy tutor.

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Zuko turns him into a blue bird for seven years.

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He manages to track Florin to her cell at the palace, and the two spend every night talking at her window.

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The bird brings Florian precious jewellery from his palace to express his love, but eventually the stepmother and treat him realise what's happened.

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The blue bird is savagely injured by glass placed around florins window, and he thinks that she has betrayed him.

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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.

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Now it's florins turn to patient. You can't charm court charming when she comes in, disguised his kingdom,

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and finds a way of communicating her innocence to him and preventing his marriage to her stepsister.

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Donnelly had herself been the victim of a forced marriage to a brutal man, and she had undergone a very public divorce.

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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.

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Better to be a bird of any hue. She says, in that moral. A raven, crow or an owl?

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I do protest, then stick for life to a partner like glue.

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Who scorns you or whom you detest? Too many matches of this sort.

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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.

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Have a look at us now.

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I'm still sticking, um, with, uh, uh, men forced to transform, um, slightly unusually, um, gnomes, trolls, nymphs, dryads, Gaia, Demeter.

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They're all spirits that have care of the Earth.

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Our environment, crops and cultivation, fairy rings, meadows, tree dwellings are familiar features of the fairy tale.

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Trees are spaces of hiding and of confinement.

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In the fairy and the folktale, think of Ariel, trapped in a tree by the witch acts in Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

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Think of puck, another of Shakespeare's fairies, in a midsummer Night's Dream,

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who plays tricks on rural labourers and carries plant poisons and love potions across the globe to serve Oberon.

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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.

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Fairy style stories often remind us of our responsibility to tend to Earth's creations and support its cycles of growth and decay.

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Roses are an especially powerful metaphor in literature for romantic attachment.

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Most often in fairy tales and fairy representations,

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they're associated with women rose Red and Snow White, the two lovely sisters born from parental wish.

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In the Grimm tales, the rose that beauty's father picks out of season that enslaves her to the beast.

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The wild Rose Fairy of Sicily, Barker's 1930 illustration.

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You can see that now, 17th century, um,

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contemporary writer Catherine Bernhardt gives us an unusual male fairy associated with the rose in her 1696 story Prince Rosebush,

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which is inserted in a longer novel called Inés of Cordoba.

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We're introduced first to a princess.

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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,

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and Florent is cursed to fall in love with a lover whom she will not see.

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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.

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And when she's grown up, he meets the fairy as he's escaping from his rooms,

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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.

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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.

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It bent its little branches as she approached, and in its own way seemed to give her its approval.

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Things get more sinister, though. When she comes to near.

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She pricks her finger, drawing red blood, and the next morning she finds herself drawn back to the bush,

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which entangles her tightly, and, to her surprise, sighs in her ear.

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The rosebush confides that the fairies obliged him to obtain the shape to gain access to Florent,

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and that he cannot convert back to his proper shape until his love is returned by the most beautiful person in the world.

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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.

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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.

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France is more in love with the bush than the boy, it appears.

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After his assiduous courtship, she confesses that she feels the same, and he's restored his true self.

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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.

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So she sends him off to the island of youth.

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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.

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When Florence sends him a note. They she comes back.

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They're joyfully married, only for their union to prove unhappy,

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because he admits that he was attracted to the Queen of youth, and that prompts her jealousy.

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Finally, persecuted by her fury, he asks, we told the fairies to turn him back into a rosebush, which they did as a favour.

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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.

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Since that time, roses give people the vapours, we're told so here too, the story is about the power of story.

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We're in love with story, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale.

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But the tale itself warns against that infatuation and offers some hard headed insights into the true nature of lasting commitment.

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Like other similar stories, such as the animal fable,

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the fairy story also here reminds us of the incompatibility of species A rose is a rose, a human, it's a human.

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

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Okay. My last element. Fire salamanders are the fairies Paracelsus associates with.

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Fire goblins are the creatures of the earth who make fire in its bowels and keep gold beneath its surface.

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A shunned subterranean race in Terry Pratchett's Disco World Series, fairies themselves are associated with fire.

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Think of Tinkerbell image that's a little light flickering, but unlike the other elements fire,

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it's more often an agent in its own right, rather than an element inhabited by spirits or fairies or embodied by them.

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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.

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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.

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The fire that lures children into the witch's house is also where she keeps her cauldron to cook them.

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It's also the heart and the hearth of story around which audiences gather to hear fairy tales.

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So here's John Clare in the early 19th century, describing the children gathered round the fire at winter,

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listening to an old woman tell fairy tales thus tame the winter night regales with wonders,

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never ceasing tales while in a corner, ill at ease or crushing tween their father's knees.

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The children are silent all the while, and in repressed laughter.

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Small quake with the ague chill. Chills of fear and tremble.

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Though they love to hear. And then we're told. Later.

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Still asleep. They secret to their pillows. Creep and whisper.

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Or in Terry's way, the prayers they dare no louder say.

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Then hide their heads beneath the clothes. And try in vain to seek repose.

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While yet to fancies sleepless I. Which is on the sheep trays galloped by.

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And fairies like a rising spark swarm.

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Twittering round them in the dark. So the fairies recall the flames as they rise.

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And the children's dreams like rising sparks.

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The flames also imperil the children of the tales of the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were published in 1812.

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Most famously, of course, Hansel and Gretel, where Hansel is fattened up in preparation to be cooked and eaten by the witch.

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I think even more terrifying is the story of abuse and complicity told in The Juniper Tree, sometimes called the almond tree.

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Does anyone know this tale? Some nods.

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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.

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And just red is blood. She dies giving birth and the father remarries, conceiving a daughter with his new wife.

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The boy's stepmother finds herself consumed by dislike.

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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.

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She conceals the murder by chopping the body up and serving it to her husband as a stew.

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His morning sister, Marlena, collects up the discarded bones that have been sucked clean by the unknowing and hungry father,

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and she buries them in a silk shirt under the juniper tree.

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And then we're told, um.

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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.

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At the same time, smoke drifted out of the tree, and in the heart of the smoke there was a brightly burning fire.

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Then a wonderful bird flapped from the flames and began singing beautifully.

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He soared higher and higher into the air, and when he disappeared, the juniper tree was just as it was before.

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He had the threat of being turned into story, consumed as a story, boiled in a cauldron, a story and eaten.

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It's made kind of literal in the story.

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So too the salamander or phoenix story of rebirth through flame is echoing here, and we have overtures of biblical resonance.

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Of course, the eating of the apple, the satanic temptation of the mother,

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the stepmother, the burning bush of religious vision sort of coexisting with folklore.

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The bird sings a beautiful song. Minamata. She killed me.

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My father. He ate me. My sister Marlena made certain to gather my bones all together.

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And silk wrapped so nicely under the juniper tree. And the glory of the bird song wins it.

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Tokens a gold chain from a goldsmith, red shoes from a shoemaker, and a large millstone from a miller.

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The bird flies back to the juniper tree,

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where the father's heart is suddenly lifted after his grief at the sudden unexplained disappearance of his son.

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But the stepmother complains, I'm so frightened that my teeth are rattling in my head, my blood's in flames in my veins,

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and she carries on using this language of being heated up from the inside, consumed by flames.

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Marlena weeps bitterly and expressed a desire to see the singing bird outside.

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The bird drops a gold chain around the neck of the father, the shoes at the feet of Marlena.

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The wife leaps to her feet and her hair flared and crackled like the flames of [INAUDIBLE] as she runs outside,

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and the bird throws the millstone on her head and crushes her. The newly made family go inside to eat.

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In this tale, fire burns and redeems as well as providing heat to prepare food.

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The story also, of course, interestingly brings together elements in a kind of melting pot of story not only fire,

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but the earth in the shape of the juniper tree, the air in the bird, and its flight in song.

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So let's take a breath, put our pens down and think where we've landed.

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Fairy tales do this very often. Poe and Donnelly finish tales with a moral that brings us back to earth,

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explaining what the prosaic and everyday conclusion is that we can draw from the enchanted and enchanting tale we've just been in.

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Claire Pollard's heroine, Marie Donnelly, a kind of fictionalised version of the real life doyen of the salons,

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is described as turning to writing when she was a teenager,

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abused by her father and then forced into an unhappy marriage with a much older and violent man.

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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.

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This is Claire Pollard saying of Marie Donnelly the pen is a magic wand she can tap and a door somewhere else appears.

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So we've seen the violence and familial conflict in fairy tales that sits alongside the magic that sometimes offers freedom,

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but also sometimes locked in its own inevitable destiny.

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Perhaps our best conclusion is that fairy tales give us a formal representation of metamorphosis itself,

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turning one thing into another with the pen or the voice.

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Opening doors to other ways of being. These can be dark and dangerous, as well as shimmering prospects of alternative forms of life.

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Choosing to immerse yourself in these worlds as a writer and a reader is to open yourself to change,

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even when you feel powerless to affect it in your own present life.

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And this is probably their enduring appeal for children and adults alike.

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I hope what I've said here makes you want to read on and read more in fairy tales, or write them yourselves.

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Um, and to that end, I've provided a reading list in the PowerPoint for you.

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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.

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The second page gives you 17th century French, uh, information about 17th and 18th and 19th century work.

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And my last page, um, some key critical works that you might want to consult.

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Thank you. Thank you.

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That was brilliant. In fact, we probably are going to have to huddle here for the microphone for now.

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So we'll take it in turns because I don't think the roaming mic is working very well.

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So I'm going to you've actually left us a very nice chunk of time for questions.

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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,

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I'm going to say we might have time for another question, but if anyone wants a comfort break,

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go now because the next talk will also be in an hour slot.

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Um, do we have a question from the room to begin with?

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A lot of the examples that you mentioned were written by women or surrounding particularly feminine themes.

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I was wondering if there's a particular reason why you think fairy tales can kind of relate to the feminine experience,

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or perhaps if there were any other bits that appeal more to masculinity?

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Yeah. Well, I'm I think that there's a kind of, um, there are two ways that you can come at this.

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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,

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there's a big debate going on between sort of, um, modern literature, the moderns and the ancients, how it's described.

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And I suppose, uh, pepo is an advocate, a male writer, but he's an advocate of the modern, um,

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and the modern is often being associated with the feminine against the kind of masculine authority which is a classical tradition,

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um, associated with masculine voice. So I think there's a way in which the kind of clever,

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witty tale telling of the fairy tale that's being set up as an alternative form of literary tradition

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that could challenge those ancient training in classical literatures that are associated with men.

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So I think there's a kind of historical story that I think there's also a probably a sociological one.

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Um, and various critics. Marina Warner, um, Dan Perkins as well talked about this, um, sort of idea that that actually,

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um, the kind of scenario of the stepmother is not an uncommon one in, um,

375
00:38:01,400 --> 00:38:08,660
folk life or in sort of in the lives of people of this period, so that, um, and the sort of sense of,

376
00:38:08,870 --> 00:38:16,909
of women's precarity, um, in these environments, social environments is quite powerfully communicated in the towns.

377
00:38:16,910 --> 00:38:22,459
But there are also ways of working through those anxieties about your own precariousness as a

378
00:38:22,460 --> 00:38:28,760
woman being attached to a family that might cast you out or might call you out as a witch.

379
00:38:29,300 --> 00:38:33,680
Um, so I think there's a sort of historical story there of witches and parents and women.

380
00:38:34,340 --> 00:38:37,670
Um, I suppose I also, um.

381
00:38:39,780 --> 00:38:49,280
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.

382
00:38:49,740 --> 00:38:56,300
The idea that these are stories in which kind of feminine and masculine forces are often being pitted against each other,

383
00:38:56,600 --> 00:38:57,880
not necessarily in traditional way.

384
00:38:57,930 --> 00:39:06,510
So the elements are being associated with or being gendered quite powerfully in ways that sort of resonate with us as readers.

385
00:39:06,810 --> 00:39:11,210
So I think I don't want to say it's all kind of explained by historical courses.

386
00:39:11,220 --> 00:39:20,390
I think that's ways in which our imagination tends to want to organise things by differentiating categories.

387
00:39:20,400 --> 00:39:24,150
And one of the most powerful organising categories in our culture is gender.

388
00:39:24,780 --> 00:39:34,519
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,

389
00:39:34,520 --> 00:39:38,360
and if you speak about that, that's interesting.

390
00:39:40,740 --> 00:39:43,200
Do you know how much? I mean, I think I am.

391
00:39:44,040 --> 00:39:51,810
As you can probably hear, I am very interested in the history of narrative and and also in kind of long serial narratives.

392
00:39:52,440 --> 00:39:56,110
Uh, I really like embedded fairy tales.

393
00:39:56,110 --> 00:40:05,579
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,

394
00:40:05,580 --> 00:40:16,020
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,

395
00:40:16,320 --> 00:40:18,390
um, larger story.

396
00:40:19,110 --> 00:40:31,200
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.

397
00:40:31,200 --> 00:40:38,550
It doesn't necessarily unfold in tales. It can also be kind of elemental, present.

398
00:40:38,700 --> 00:40:46,260
Um, and I suppose I think in some ways that world of fairies is sometimes not best captured in the fairy tale.

399
00:40:46,740 --> 00:40:49,590
I've just been raving to keep about a wonderful, uh,

400
00:40:49,590 --> 00:40:55,950
new collection of poems by a poet called Fiona Benton called mitten, which just come out this year.

401
00:40:56,400 --> 00:41:04,470
And I think the kind of the lyric poem sometimes can be a great place to capture the kind of spirit of fairy without.

402
00:41:05,520 --> 00:41:12,150
Obliging that figure to fit into a narrative and perform a functional narrative.

403
00:41:12,180 --> 00:41:18,270
She has a wonderful poem about Robin Goodfellow, which is just about imagining that his sort of materiality,

404
00:41:18,270 --> 00:41:24,960
his tufting, is his kind of this orderliness without making it fit a narrative structure.

405
00:41:25,860 --> 00:41:29,429
Um. So. And I suppose there is in fairy tale,

406
00:41:29,430 --> 00:41:39,959
there is a strong propulsion towards narrative conclusion which can kind of push against that sense of fairies resisting order that they're there,

407
00:41:39,960 --> 00:41:44,430
this orderliness, which might be better captured by visual arts or by poetry.

408
00:41:45,430 --> 00:41:47,640
I, um. I wondered if I could ask.

409
00:41:47,650 --> 00:41:54,639
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.

410
00:41:54,640 --> 00:42:02,500
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.

411
00:42:04,310 --> 00:42:06,830
Well, I suppose that's one of the reasons I gave you John Clare,

412
00:42:07,560 --> 00:42:12,530
because I think he is capturing the fact that, you know, even the small children we like.

413
00:42:13,660 --> 00:42:20,290
The violent, the grisly. You know, we like to be scared. I mean, we like that sense of threat.

414
00:42:20,710 --> 00:42:24,820
Perhaps also a sense of threat averted or put somewhere else.

415
00:42:25,480 --> 00:42:31,600
So it's not to present to us. I guess that's why I finished on that quotation around Mary Donnelly as well.

416
00:42:31,600 --> 00:42:36,070
Sort of. It's a way of experiencing threat.

417
00:42:37,060 --> 00:42:41,460
In a displaced way. That's that's kind of the power of fantasy, I suppose.

418
00:42:41,470 --> 00:42:45,940
I'm sure that's recurred in lots of these lectures and discussions today.

419
00:42:46,540 --> 00:42:53,379
Um, I do think that's perhaps why I wanted to start with talking about metaphor and metamorphosis,

420
00:42:53,380 --> 00:42:59,500
because I suppose I think the kind of apparent sort of facticity of the fairy tale,

421
00:42:59,500 --> 00:43:09,280
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.

422
00:43:10,300 --> 00:43:16,150
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,

423
00:43:16,420 --> 00:43:22,809
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,

424
00:43:22,810 --> 00:43:28,810
but also to experience the tale on a very material basis, on a very physical and embodied basis.

425
00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:33,280
And I find that really interesting. I think it's quite a difficult thing for literary.

426
00:43:34,200 --> 00:43:37,769
Writing to achieve, and I think fairy do it very well,

427
00:43:37,770 --> 00:43:44,310
that you can hold the metaphorical and the material and the figurative in the material, in the same mental space.

428
00:43:45,540 --> 00:43:51,570
Um, okay, so I've got one that says, um, what do you think about the continuing impact of fairy tales in modern culture?

429
00:43:51,960 --> 00:43:56,280
Um, and where meaning is often found beyond the original one that was intended?

430
00:43:58,230 --> 00:44:01,440
Good question. Um.

431
00:44:05,370 --> 00:44:07,500
What do I think about the continuing impact?

432
00:44:07,800 --> 00:44:16,050
I suppose in some ways, sometimes I'm a bit disappointed by the way that fairy tale features in contemporary representation,

433
00:44:16,500 --> 00:44:21,000
that it feels as though it's often being kind of invoked as some sort of, uh, I don't know,

434
00:44:21,000 --> 00:44:28,710
sort of ancient memory or something lost or in the past, um, that when it's modernised.

435
00:44:30,440 --> 00:44:34,640
Hmm. I used to love. I still do love feminist fairy tale.

436
00:44:34,670 --> 00:44:42,260
Actually, I like that sort of twisting. But I suppose I think that also conceals the fact that the tales themselves were quite feminist.

437
00:44:42,440 --> 00:44:51,679
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,

438
00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:55,969
and that you've got to do something to them. I think that's all in there in those original tales.

439
00:44:55,970 --> 00:45:00,200
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.

440
00:45:00,200 --> 00:45:03,830
And now we've got this kind of progressive world where we've got to rewrite them.

441
00:45:04,580 --> 00:45:11,309
Um, I quite like fairy elements when they enter, but I'm.

442
00:45:11,310 --> 00:45:14,990
I'm huge. I'm fascinated by historical drama.

443
00:45:16,070 --> 00:45:22,970
Um, so I've kind of been I spent much too much of one sabbatical watching all of Outlander,

444
00:45:24,680 --> 00:45:32,870
and I thought, I like that mix of the fairy, the witch, and the kind of, um, a time travel story.

445
00:45:33,770 --> 00:45:40,190
And Outlander, I think is quite intelligent. And I think it's I also think it's a kind of miracle of modern marketing.

446
00:45:40,580 --> 00:45:49,850
It's kind of making a kind of television series for women that has all of the kind of military historical bluster,

447
00:45:49,880 --> 00:45:53,580
bluff and bluster that that people associate with that kind of series.

448
00:45:53,600 --> 00:46:02,440
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.

449
00:46:02,580 --> 00:46:05,840
The fact that she's a nurse and then a later surgeon.

450
00:46:06,170 --> 00:46:10,790
So when she goes back in time, she's bringing these kind of modern surgical methods back.

451
00:46:11,180 --> 00:46:21,319
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,

452
00:46:21,320 --> 00:46:26,990
historically may be things that are in fact scientific discovery or changes in the way we think.

453
00:46:28,040 --> 00:46:31,489
Um, yeah. Um, there are a couple.

454
00:46:31,490 --> 00:46:35,780
There are a couple here with, like, you're kind of asking your opinion on a quote by an author.

455
00:46:35,780 --> 00:46:38,950
Um, uh, that could maybe be asked quickly also.

456
00:46:39,290 --> 00:46:44,600
Um, do you agree with C.S. Lewis as, quote, someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

457
00:46:45,200 --> 00:46:50,090
Um hmm. That's good. Oh, goodness. That's a really interesting.

458
00:46:50,540 --> 00:46:55,540
I mean, I guess it's part of that sort of sense of ancient wisdom, isn't it?

459
00:46:55,550 --> 00:47:04,220
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.

460
00:47:04,790 --> 00:47:08,570
Actually, uh, would be a another answer that I would have.

461
00:47:08,930 --> 00:47:13,310
Um, I think I think they are really important for adults as well.

462
00:47:13,460 --> 00:47:18,740
And that's why I really enjoy that 17th century tradition, because it is in some ways an adult tradition.

463
00:47:19,340 --> 00:47:25,340
And, um, but but I but I also think, yeah, all children should be introduced to fairy.

464
00:47:25,340 --> 00:47:28,340
They're not lies. They're a way of understanding what fiction is.

465
00:47:29,030 --> 00:47:33,620
I would say, um, and and perhaps understanding the difference between lies and fiction.

466
00:47:34,670 --> 00:47:43,400
It's in the form. In which case I think we should thank Rose once again for her amazing lecture.

467
00:47:44,120 --> 00:47:44,960
Thank you.