I once heard an actor (I think it was Derek Jacobi) state that in order for a person to fully understand English Literature properly one needed to know well both Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
While I can see the reasoning to such an idea, I also can't help but wonder if a grounding in old folk and fairy tales might be just as important in helping our middle grade readers to understand more fully and appreciate more widely the stories and books they are likely to encounter, as well as cultural issues they are likely to face.
The themes running through Grimm Fairytales, perhaps the most famous anthology of such stories and of which we are all familiar - The Princess and the Frog, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel and Rumplestiltskin to name a few - are as ubiquitous and universal as they are challenging. The forest is threatening and ever changing - an unknown entity lurking with threat and mystery. Powerful or outspoken women are rarely to be trusted. Young maidens are often victims of their own beauty and naevity, and it is a fool who dares to trust the old hag who dwells in the house in the woods. The female is dangerous and unstable.
The tales themselves then are a stark comment on the view of women at the time of publication and yet that very view is a one that still carries through into so much of what our young people read and experience today. But it is changing. The postmodern view of the Fairytale or the genre of 'fairy tales retold' as it were, is a one that is hard to miss in the current offering of children's literature. Books such as Forgetten Tales of Brave and Brilliant Girls from Usborne tells the stories of swashbuckling adventurous girls; The House with the Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson and The City of Lost Dreamers by Lisa Lueddecke cast the usually terrifying old hag (in these books the Slavic mystic Baba Yaga) as a nuanced character who despite being wholly aware of her power to destroy, has a heart based in fairness and a willingness to do the right thing. In Kiran Millwood Hargrave's, The Way Past Winter, our heroine triumphs over masculine power to save her home and the ones she loves.
Girls in these stories, unlike in Grimm, are not meek and mild, nor are they threatening and untrustworthy. Instead they are portrayed as capable, intelligent people who see the world and take action themselves in order to change or challenge an injustice around them.
And yet without an express knowledge of what has come before - the stories from which their current reading book was born - children lack the opportunity to develop a greater sense of understanding of the texts in front of them. The unmistakable references and allusions to the traditional fairytale within this new genre of fiction are so thick and so real that a solid knowledge of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and other folk tales only serves to make the child's reading experience all the richer.
So whilst we should value and nuture a knowledge and love of Shakespeare and scripture, for our early and middle grade readers folklore and fairytales have to be key.
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