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Andrew Pudewa #2: Fairy Tales and Stories

Nature Deficit Disorder

Fairy Tale
  • There is more Truth in fairy tales than in history books
  • GK Chesterton - “It is far more reasonable for a frog to turn into a prince, than for an egg to turn into a chicken”
  • GK Chesterton - “We don’t read children fairy tales so that they know dragons exist; they already know dragons exist! We read to them so they know that dragons can be slain.”
  • Facts from Fairy Tales
    • Properly ordered, King to love his people, and the people love their king.
      • Kingdom = kin domain (the domain where your kin is)
      • Starts as a family that gets bigger and bigger and the patriarch of the family becomes the king
    • Trolls and Witches and Dragons and Evil should be slain (not tolerated)
    • Frogs can turn out to be princes… and princes may turn out to be frogs! Seeing behind the surface of things
    • Forests (i.e. dark alleys) can be dangerous places…
    • Evil disguises itself and innocence is fundamentally beautiful
    • True love is possible
    • You can live happily ever after (i.e. forever) if you do the right things
  • Modern renditions twist and warp these things (e.g. Disney)
Four Types of Stories

80% of time on Whole Stories. 13% on Healing Stories. 7% on Broken Stories. 0% on Twisted Stories

  1. Whole (Complete, Perfect) Stories
    • Good is good. Evil is evil. Good wins in the end.
    • Our souls crave thee stories because we need reminders that good wins in the end
  2. Healing Stories
    • Good is good. Evil is evil. Good doesn’t win as you expect, but there is redemption
    • The Little Mermaid (original)
    • The Matchseller
  3. Broken Stories
    • Good is good. Evil is evil. Evil wins.
    • Seeing the things we succumb to in a small but gradual way
    • The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde
    • 1984
    • Lord of the Flies
  4. Twisted Stories
    • Evil is good or glorified. Good is evil or dumb or boring.
    • Usually modern stories (i.e. 20th Century and after)
    • Clockwork Orange
Twisting of Archetypes
  • Landscape with Dragons - Michael D. O’Brien
  • Archetypes have representatives
  • Dragons 
    • Originally, in all history, dragons represented the devil…
    • All of a sudden, the image of a dragon to be something cute or fun
      • Potentially “Puff the Magic Dragon” song
      • Eragon
      • How to train your dragon, etc.
    • Deep within you… are you trying to “train the dragon” or slay the dragon with the help of the king?
  • Vampires
    • Twlight
  • Magic (Harry Potter)
    • Disorder of Archetype
    • In Tolkien and Lewis, all the characters that do magic are “supernatural archetypes”; regular people can’t do anything
      • In Rowling, it’s the normal people (muggles) that can’t do magic and you don’t want to be like them
    • The magic in Tolkien’s world just happens - you have no idea how it happens. It doesn’t say. You, as the reader, can’t know how magic works.
      • In Rowling, the mechanics of how to do spells - Latin incantation, special herbs and potions, etc.
    • Disordered Acting Out
      • After Harry Potter, kids would go and search up “how to do magic” - “how to do witchcraft” (International Librarian Report)
      • After Twilight, girls would go to the hospital with flesh bitten out of their neck because “my bf wanted to show me how much he loves me”
Moral Imagination
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