Fairytales have been very important to me ever since I was little. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who the classic fairytale characters were. So yes I do think fairytales are extremely important in society. Fairytales serve as a way for us to examine our fears, doubts, and hopes in magical ways. For kids they bring them to a far off land with magic and dragons that bring joy to them. It makes kids want to explore and go on adventures just like the characters in these stories. It also teaches them certain values and morals from a young age which they carry for their whole lives. For adults it shows them hope in dark times, and how good people will always be fine and happy in the end. It makes them use their imagination which not many adults do very much. These stories bring a sense of hope and joy into people’s lives that they can relate to which is why they are still widely popular today.
In my opinion, I feel Ashliman helped me understand fairytales better. I like the way he broke them up into four different categories. Fairytales can be used for the fulfillment of wishes, to express fears, to educate, or to explain the unexplainable. He talked about the four different symbols you find in stories, and even broke these tales down even further into sub categories like religious takes, romantic tales, and magic tales just to name a few. After reading that article I feel like I could easily classify all the fairytales we read into each of these categories to further understand the purpose and message of them.
What surprised me in this class were some of the fairytales I’ve actually never heard of. Going into this class I thought I would know every story we read, but it turns out I didn’t. I’ve heard of Bluebeard but I didn’t know anything about it. Same as Puss in Boots, I love the Dreamworks movie but I knew nothing about the original story. Donkeyskin and The Juniper Tree I never even heard of or knew existed at all. And then of course there were the tales that were made into Disney movies, like Beauty and the Beast. I didn’t know the original well so I enjoyed reading it and comparing it to Disney’s. I enjoyed reading the stories I wasn’t as familiar with. But I was more familiar with a lot more than I expected because there was this book series I read when I was nine called Whatever After which was about these two kids who got pulled into these original fairytales and had to help fix them. They would basically watch the entire fairytale happen in the book so I knew all these original versions already from reading that.
The most interesting part of this fairytale topic in our class was just reading all these stories. I had the most fun comparing them to modern day movies. I didn’t enjoy reading the theorist articles very much, I just liked learning about the original fairytales and talking about them after. It’s very cool to know that these are the exact tales people read centuries ago.
I really wanted to read The Little Mermaid so I was sad we missed that. I honestly just wanted to finish all the fairytales in the book so that’s primarily what I feel like we missed out on. I wanted to read The Little Match Girl as well since I’ve seen the Disney short version of that story. I think for the next class, instead of reading all of the theorist articles we went over, maybe cut back a few and read some more fairytales. I feel like you learn more by reading more fairytales and drawing similarities and morals from each story instead of reading an article about someone’s opinion of what the fairytales mean. I’d rather figure out what they mean to me on my own than by reading someone else’s words.
