When I talk to children about folk tales and why they matter, not fairy tales so much, they took because they have their own truths, but folk tales specifically, fairy tales inevitably were going to have fairies and witches and gnomes and ogres and things that go boogity, boogity in the night. Folktales are exactly what they sound like. It’s a compound word. Stories of the people, whether they be the Hmong refugees or they be the Tainos of Cuba or a Germanic tribe.
People as they evolve create their own stories. And those stories are meant to somehow guide that particular tribe and their ethos forward. It’s not always a good one. It doesn’t have to be. It tells us who they are. “This is who we are. These are our stories. This is how we think we should bury people. This is how we believe we treat the enemy after he’s been vanquished, a vanquished foe. This is how we believe we treat the dying or the widow or the orphan. This is how we think fate works. This is how we believe about the afterlife.”
They’re meant to teach. They’re meant to teach what that culture believes. And what’s beautiful about them is that the really wonderful ones always have risen to the top and then travel the world. And the oldest Cinderella is Rhodopis and the Gilded Sandal. It’s Egyptian.
A secret society of story-lovers
I have never known a time in my life when I did not love stories. And I don’t believe that’s peculiar to me. I believe there’s a whole lot of people like that. I think it’s, we’re a secret society with a secret handshake.
