The Brothers Grimm appear to have helped motivate a large number of nineteenth century writers and scholars -- in several countries -- to record and save wonder tales, folktales, and local mythology -- to save the culture of the past. Aside from overcoming lethargy. religious beliefs, and political hubris, there were issues of language and tumultuous events to overcome. In Ireland, the issues also involved the Gaelic language and became very political. Continue reading

"Many of us today have no kith. . .no ancestral place. Or we had one once, but lost it long ago. Or we've been transplanted into new soil, our roots still shallow, our claim still tenuous. Or we are homesick for a home we never actually had; for the idea of home, and of truly belonging." quote from Terri Windling Continue reading

Before and after the printing Press in Europe (1452), people passed on spoken tales that told in a direct, imaginative, and often entertaining way about the outrages, cruelties, and inequities of everyday life. These stories (wonder tales), told in a tavern, a market place, or a farm house could satirize directly, or by analogy, those in power -- their greed, cruelty, and incompetence, without persecution of the story teller. For example; Continue reading

Joy to The World. . . The conservative British oligarchy was influenced by Tiny Tim and the three Ghosts of Christmas. And ordinary people took the message of charity to heart. The Christmas season has continued to evolve. In our era, it has become a time of celebration, charity and gift giving. And, a profitable marketplace. Continue reading

Creating stories with animals behaving like people with human traits, personalities, and behaviors has a long tradition going back to Aesop. Good stories, like Aesop's Fables capture the imagination and teach. Children's literature is filled with wonderful anthropomorphic animals from Carroll's Mad Hatter and Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit to Milne's Pooh Bear and Grahame's Toad. From Kipling's jungle to powerful bears under a spell, the literature of the young has also become literature for YA and adults. Continue reading

Amidst eons of uncertainty, tales were passed on that reflected many facets of the world, from the adventures of poor peasants, to the dilemmas of Royal ladies of the Court. They were fueled by imagination. They dealt with poverty, fear, and brutality. They satirized the powerful, amused listeners, and usually gave hope. Continue reading

Actually, adult readers had been finding and reading wonder tales and fantasy since Gulliver landed in the land of the Lilliputians -- if not before. Continue reading

A storm and a shipwreck were transit vehicles for Jonathan Swift in the same way that C.S. Lewis used a wardrobe to take children to Narnia; or that Lewis Carroll had Alice going down the Rabbit hole to Wonderland, or, more recently, Neil Gaiman's character, Door, in Neverwhere who was the very embodiment of a transit point.They were all transit phenomena that took characters in stories to an alternate reality, a world of fantasy. . . Continue reading

"Fantasy is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality.. . Ursula Le Guin Continue reading

Difficult challenges and trials, even those that come at a tender young age, can make us wiser, stronger, and braver; they can serve to transform us, rather than sending us limping into the future. Terri Windling Continue reading

How did people endure, for centuries, the dark times of plague, famine, drought and war? Life was short and often brutal. Courage, endurance, and using your wits could mean the difference between life and death. Wonder tales were often tales of becoming, tales of overcoming the great hardships of life, even under dangerous circumstances. Continue reading

Wonder Tales brought fantasy to the world and over time opened doors of the imagination for children. Books followed the books. Imagination and the mysteries of existence opened adult's minds even more. Continue reading

I have mixed feeling about witches. I have compassion for the witches of the past -- from Joan of Arc to Salem and beyond -- who have been brutalised and suffered. I have mixed feelings about miracle working saints and relics. I have found the witches in Macbeth and the Wicked Witch of the West foreboding. I like the witches of Phillip Pullman and Glinda the Good Witch of Oz. I respect true healers of many kinds,.past and present. Researching and reading about witches today has been filled with new awareness of the fear and misogny behind the perception and treatment of withches. Continue reading

Wonder tales are forever changing, reflections of the times, the culture, and the teller of the tale. Continue reading

Fantasy lives in the imagination. Fantasy is not limited by time or place. It is limited only by the mind of the individual, young or old.. Fantasy opens the mind to possibilities, to discovery, to hope. Continue reading

A Christmas Carol was the catalyst for the holiday season that we observe and celebrate today. This is a ghost story, a story of poverty, suffering, fear and redemption -- an unlikely sounding mix -- that comes together in a book that has touched people since it first appeared. Continue reading

"But instead of a dream that functions in the individual psyche, the fairy tale seems to function for an entire culture. It is effectively a collective fantasy. As it is told and retold, elements of the story added by the individual teller fall away, like sifted sand, while the more universal themes remain, so it becomes valid for the group of people (the listeners) in general." Excepted from a lecture on Snow White by Nancy van-den Berg-Cook. Link: The Magic Mirror in Snow White Continue reading

During the time (Reconstruction) when Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) wrote Little Women (1868), America was recovering from the darkness and pain of the Civil War. . .Little Women has touched vast numbers of people, and as the posts below confirm, in many ways, it was a book of depth and ahead of the times. Alcott was a gifted writer with the ability to move her readers. Continue reading

In our era, the reinterpretation of wonder tales and legends has taken many forms, from rewritng the original story, to creating in an entirely different medium -- theater music, dance, film, video, photography, painting and scupture. The results are often quite extraordinary.Wonder tales are alive in many forms. Continue reading

"The idea of linguistic nonsense takes hold as a force in children's literature in the mid nineteenth century and never seems to let go. . . the idea of nonsense as a force of the imagination, of nonsense as a challenge to the logic of adulthood and the laws of civil life .. that was a new idea in Victorian England. The masters of that nonsense were, of course, Lewis Carroll and Edmund Lear." Seth Lerer Continue reading