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