Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning | Page 3

had
happened. Thus the dwellers in Fairy Land have no cares about
chronology. With them there is no past or future; it is all present--so
there are no disagreeable dates to learn, nor tables of kings, and when
they reigned, or who succeeded them, or what battles they fought, or
anything of that kind. Indeed there are no such facts to be learned, for
when kings are wicked in Fairy Land, a powerful magician comes and
twists their heads off, or puts them to death somehow; and when they
are good kings they seem to live for ever, and always to be wearing rich
robes and royal golden crowns, and to be entertaining Fairy Queens,
and receiving handsome brilliant gifts from everybody who knows
them.
Now this is Fairy Land, the dear sweet land of Once Upon a Time,
where there is constant light, and summer days, and everlasting flowers,
and pleasant fields and streams, and long dreams without rough waking,
and ease of life, and all things strange and beautiful; where nobody
wonders at anything that may happen; where good fairies are ever on
the watch to help those whom they love; where youth abides, and there
is no pain or death, and all trouble fades away, and whatever seems
hard is made easy, and all things that look wrong come right in the end,
and truth and goodness have their perpetual triumph, and the world is
ever young.
And Fairy Land is always the same, and always has been, whether it is
close to us--so close that we may enter it in a moment--or whether it is
far off; in the stories that have come to us from the most ancient days,
and the most distant lands, and in those which kind and clever
story-tellers write for us now. It is the same in the legends of the
mysterious East, as old as the beginning of life; the same in the glowing
South, in the myths of ancient Greece; the same in the frozen regions of
the Scandinavian North, and in the forests of the great Teuton land, and
in the Islands of the West; the same in the tales that nurses tell to the
little ones by the fireside on winter evenings, and in the songs that
mothers sing to hush their babes to sleep; the same in the delightful

folk-lore that Grimm has collected for us, and that dear Hans Andersen
has but just ceased to tell.
All the chief stories that we know so well are to be found in all times,
and in almost all countries. Cinderella, for one, is told in the language
of every country in Europe, and the same legend is found in the fanciful
tales related by the Greek poets; and still further back, it appears in
very ancient Hindu legends. So, again, does Beauty and the Beast, so
does our own familiar tale of Jack the Giant Killer, so also do a great
number of other fairy stories, each being told in different countries and
in different periods, with so much likeness as to show that all the
versions came from the same source, and yet with so much difference
as to show that none of the versions are directly copied from each other.
Indeed, when we compare the myths and legends of one country with
another, and of one period with another, we find out how they have
come to be so much alike, and yet in some things so different. We see
that there must have been one origin for all these stories, that they must
have been invented by one people, that this people must have been
afterwards divided, and that each part or division of it must have
brought into its new home the legends once common to them all, and
must have shaped and altered these according, to the kind of places in
which they came to live: those of the North being sterner and more
terrible, those of the South softer and fuller of light and colour, and
adorned with touches of more delicate fancy. And this, indeed, is really
the case. All the chief stories and legends are alike, because they were
first made by one people; and all the nations in which they are now told
in one form or another tell them because they are all descended from
this one common stock. If you travel amongst them, or talk to them, or
read their history, and learn their languages, the nations of Europe seem
to be altogether unlike each other; they have different speech and
manners, and ways of thinking, and forms of government, and even
different looks--for you can tell them from one another by some
peculiarity of appearance. Yet, in fact, all these nations belong to one
great family--English,