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"The Great Cauldron of Story: Maria Tatar on Why Fairy Tales are for Adults Again" — March 14, 2013 Krista Tippett, Host: There's something in the present that is finding new sustenance in the old, old storylines of fairy tales. Once upon a time in my childhood, for example, there was Disney's frothy Snow White. (Sound bite of Snow White) Snow White (voice-over by Adriana Caselotti): What do you do when things go wrong? Bird: (singing) Snow White: Oh, you sing a song! Ms. Tippett: But now, we have a darker, adult, self-realized Snow White and the Huntsman. (Sound bite of Snow White and the Huntsman) Snow White (played by Kristen Stewart): All these years, all I've known is darkness. But I have never seen a brighter light than when my eyes just opened. And I know that light burns in all of you. Ms. Tippett: The last few years have seen multiple renditions of "Snow White" and "Hansel and Gretel," as well as an updated Disney take on "Rapunzel." There are overt fairy tale themes in hit TV series like True Blood, Grimm, and Once Upon a Time. To uncover what all of this might be saying about our time, we turn to Maria Tatar. She's an expert on classic fairy tales and legends and on how they help us work with things like fear and hope. These stories, she says, have survived by adapting across cultures and history. They are carriers of the plots we endlessly rework as we weave the narratives of our lives. Ms. Maria Tatar: There's the great "once upon a time," which is a marker. It says this is not the here and now. You can let your imagination run wild. You can go in places that you'd be scared to go otherwise. You can say things that you're afraid to talk about. You know, and in just mysterious ways you come to an understanding or a resolution. Not a resolution, I should say, because you have to keep working through things. Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. This is On Being — from APM, American Public Media. Maria Tatar is a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University, where she also chairs the program in folklore and mythology. When she was doing her graduate studies, such stories were not deemed serious enough for scholarly attention. But she inched towards them with a doctoral thesis on a 19th-century German philosopher who delved into the "dark side" of nature. A daughter of Hungarian immigrants who fled Holocaust-era Central Europe, these themes were the stuff of reality, not fantasy, for Maria Tatar. Ms. Tippett: You know, whoever I'm talking with, whatever subject — I actually always start with this question about whether there was a religious or spiritual background to your childhood. Ms. Tatar: Oh gosh, I did, I was going to say, I had a secular childhood. But I was sort of obliged to go to Sunday services, you know, with my family. And I remember that as utter torture, sitting through a sermon. And maybe that explains why I was attracted to fairy tales. Because of the excitement and the thrill and, you know, they never — they never turned you into the bored child. But there was something spiritual about it, in that my sister and I read the stories in a book called Die schönsten Kindermärchen der Brüder Grimm, The Most Beautiful Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. I didn't know German. She didn't know German either. But this book had these gorgeous illustrations, which just drew us into the stories. And so I just remember looking at those illustrations and falling in love with them. And the artist wasn't particularly distinguished. It wasn't Arthur Rackham who gave us those gorgeous gnarly trees and whimsical trolls and beautiful princesses. But nonetheless, I can still see those images in my mind's eye. Ms. Tippett: And it also sounds to me from your, who your family was and where they came from that the fairy tales were part of your childhood. And also you had this personal connection to the kind of dramatic and menacing tone that's in some of those fairy tales. I read you wrote somewhere that Europe was a place for you that signified deep horror. And that mingling of kind of operatic beauty — I think that's a phrase I've used — and kind of monstrous terror, that combination, that juxtaposition is such an endearing quality of these stories. Ms. Tatar: That collision always makes a direct visceral hit. And you get both in the story and yet also the promise of a happily ever after. Ms. Tippett: Right. Ms. Tatar: That is, no matter how horrible that monster is, how frightening, the hero survives. The hero will battle that monster — figure out a way to outwit it — to get behind it and push it into the oven, rather than being devoured. So the fact that there is a way out I think is, you know, one of the great strengths of these fairy tales and a reason why we can also read them to children or tell them to children, without having deep anxieties about how it will damage them in one way or another. Ms. Tippett: You know, one of the things though that I feel you've been very important in bringing out for people is telling the story of the Brothers Grimm. And I mean you, you initially became a scholar of these kinds of stories. And they were scholars, you know, and there's an anecdote in one of your books where you talk about William Grimm remembering his father, whose one of the brothers and saying, silence was there real element, and describing that all the only sound he associated with was the scratching of their pens and Jacob's little coughs. So tell a little bit of that story of what they felt they were doing, and what they were working with originally, which is a little bit of different from what has come down to us. Ms. Tatar: Oh, well you've flagged an extraordinary point, because, you know, they're growing up in silence and yet they're connecting with an oral story, you know. Ms. Tippett: Yes, yes. Ms. Tatar: With these vibrant scenes around the fireside where people are, you know, gossiping, exchanging stories. Ms. Tippett: Scaring each other. Ms. Tatar: And scaring each other. No, there's no television, no electronic entertainment. So what are you going to do but, you know, create stories that are as melodramatic as possible, that have the highs and lows and everything in between. So there are these brothers, and they — in their 20s, they decided to undertake this great scholarly project of collecting folklore — the voice of the people, Volkspoesie. But you know the Grimms themselves were quite cosmopolitan. And I think what they wanted to do was collect these stories before they disappeared. Yes, there was sort of an effort to consolidate national identity and all of that. But they recognized that these stories went way back. They were mythical, they were powerful, they were changing over time. And they wanted to capture how these stories were being told in their own day and age. So, what did they do? They wrote to others scholars, writers, and then they listened. They listened to the stories in their own milieu, getting the stories, grabbing them from wherever they found them, putting them into this volume, and discovering that they were actually selling copies of this book. That parents were reading the stories to children. Ms. Tippett: And that wasn't necessarily something they had foreseen what happened, is it? Ms. Tatar: It was not part of their plan. Ms. Tippett: Right, right. Ms. Tatar: And I think they were quite thrilled by it. And they also were responding, as they went through successive editions editing the tales — responding to reviewers, some of whom worried about the sexual allusions in the tales. Ms. Tippett: Right. Ms. Tatar: These were, after all, they were adult entertainment. And the vulgar coarse language, the scatological humor in the tales as well. So they started editing out, making the tales a little bit more child-friendly, taking out the story of Hans Dumm, who makes girls pregnant by just looking at them. Ms. Tippett: Although I would imagine that might be one a lot of parents would like to tell their teenagers and have them believe. I mean, you know, the one, the example that in the original "Rapunzel" and a lot of those stories, the prince climbs up her hair everyday and then she gets pregnant. Right. I mean that's not really how that comes down to us. Ms. Tatar: Yes, and then in later versions, the birth of the two children is never connected with the prince. She's just magically pregnant, and yeah. Ms. Tippett: You know, I know that some people across history have spoken of this canon of fairy tales of stories as being akin to sacred cultural treasure or sacred canon. And I sense that you — for you there's a really clear distinction between these two kinds of canons that both have important places in Western culture. Ms. Tatar: Oh yeah, I'm deeply interested in the idea of looking at the evolution of the tales. How have they migrated into other cultures? What happens to a Grimm tale when it ends up in the U.S.

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