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 

 

 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 

 

 

 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 

 

 

 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 

 

 

 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