Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning | Page 2

besides, of whom we haven't time to say
anything now.
And when we come to look about us, we see that there are other
dwellers in Fairy Land; giants and dwarfs, dragons and griffins, ogres
with great white teeth, and wearing seven-leagued boots; and
enchanters and magicians, who can change themselves into any forms
they please, and can turn other people into stone. And there are beasts
and birds who can talk, and fishes that come out on dry land, with
golden rings in their mouths; and good maidens who drop rubies and
pearls when they speak, and bad ones out of whose mouths come all
kinds of ugly things. Then there are evil-minded fairies, who always
want to be doing mischief; and there are good fairies, beautifully
dressed, and with shining golden hair and bright blue eyes and jewelled
coronets, and with magic wands in their hands, who go about watching
the bad fairies, and always come just in time to drive them away, and
so prevent them from doing harm--the sort of Fairies you see once a
year at the pantomimes, only more beautiful, and more handsomely
dressed, and more graceful in shape, and not so fat, and who do not
paint their faces, which is a bad thing for any woman to do, whether
fairy or mortal.
Altogether, this Fairy Land that we can make for ourselves in a
moment, is a very pleasant and most delightful place, and one which all
of us, young and old, may well desire to get into, even if we have to
come back from it sooner than we like. It is just the country to suit
everybody, for all of us can find in it whatever pleases him best. If he

likes work, there is plenty of adventure; he can climb up mountains of
steel, or travel over seas of glass, or engage in single combat with a
giant, or dive down into the caves of the little red dwarfs and bring up
their hidden treasures, or mount a horse that goes more swiftly than the
wind, or go off on a long journey to find the water of youth and life, or
do anything else that happens to be very dangerous and troublesome. If
he doesn't like work, it is again just the place to suit idle people,
because it is all Midsummer holidays. I never heard of a school in Fairy
Land, nor of masters with canes or birch rods, nor of impositions and
long lessons to be learned when one gets home in the evening. Then the
weather is so delightful. It is perpetual sunshine, so that you may lie out
in the fields all day without catching cold; and yet it is not too hot, the
sunshine being a sort of twilight, in which you see everything, quite
clearly, but softly, and with beautiful colours, as if you were in a
delightful dream.
And this goes on night and day, or at least what we call night, for they
don't burn gas there, or candles, or anything of that kind; so that there is
no regular going to bed and getting up; you just lie down anywhere
when you want to rest, and when you have rested, you wake up again,
and go on with your travels. There is one capital thing about Fairy Land.
There are no doctors there; not one in the whole country. Consequently
nobody is ill, and there are no pills or powders, or brimstone and
treacle, or senna tea, or being kept at home when you want to go out, or
being obliged to go to bed early and have gruel instead of cake and
sweetmeats. They don't want the doctors, because if you cut your finger
it gets well directly, and even when people are killed, or are turned into
stones, or when anything else unpleasant happens, it can all be put right
in a minute or two. All you have to do when you are in trouble is to go
and look for some wrinkled old woman in a patched old brown cloak,
and be very civil to her, and to do cheerfully and kindly any service she
asks of you, and then she will throw off the dark cloak, and become a
young and beautiful Fairy Queen, and wave her magic wand, and
everything will fall out just as you would like to have it.
As to Time, they take no note of it in Fairy Land. The Princess falls
asleep for a hundred years, and wakes up quite rosy, and young, and

beautiful. Friends and sweethearts are parted for years, and nobody
seems to think they have grown older when they meet, or that life has
become shorter, and so they fall to their youthful talk as if nothing