"Jane Yolen - Briar Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

TORO is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN 0-312-85135-9

First edition: September 1992

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321
 FOR CHARLES AND MARYANN DE LINT
AND SUSAN SHWARTZ-JUST BECAUSE
WITH SPECIAL THANKS To BARBARA DIAMOND GOLDIN,
STASZEK RADOSH, LINDA MANNHEIM, BETSY Pucci, PETER
GHERLONE, MARY Thim, AusSA GEHAN, SUSAN LANDAU,
AND SCOTT SCANLON FOR THEIR RESEARCH HELP. ANY mis-
TAKES MADE IN THE PRESENTATION OF THAT MATERIAL ARE
MINE ALONE.

I
". - . (B)oth the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are
grounded in history: they emanate from specift struggles to humanize
bestial and barbaric force5~ which have terrorized our minds and
communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free toil/ and
human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete
terror through metaphors. "

-Jack Zipes, Sr)ells of Enchantmem
INTRODUCTION

FAIRY TALES

There is no satisfactory equivalent to the German word mirchen,
tales of magic and wonder such as those collected by the Brothers
Grimm: Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, The SLY Swans, and
other such familiar stories. We call them fairy tales, although none
of the above stories actually contains a creature called a "fairy."
They do contain those ingredients most familiar to us in fairy tales:
magic and enchantment, spells and curses, witches and trolls, and
protagonists who defeat overwhelming odds to triumph over evil.
J. R. R. Tolkien, in his classic essay "On Fairy-Stories," offers the
definition that these are not in particular tales about fairies or elves,
but rather of the land of Faerie: "the Perilous Realm itself, and the
air that blows in the country, I will not attempt to define that
directly," he goes on, "for it cannot be done. Faerie cannot be
caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescrib-
able, though not imperceptible."
Fairy tales were originally created for an adult audience i The I tales
collected in the German countryside and set to paper by ffie Broth-
ers Grimm (wherein a Queen orders her stepdaughter, Snow VA ' iite,
killed and her heart served "boiled and salted for my dinner") Were