Falling under the spell of fairytales and myths

From folk tales to Greek myth, ‘old stories’ are fuelling a fantasy boom. In a recent discussion chaired by Marina Warner at the Royal Society of Literature, four authors explored the reasons why

A week after Midsummer night, the Royal Society of Literature brought together four writers for an event billed as a discussion of revamped fairy stories, but that turned out to encompass modernised myths, too. Introducing the forum, chair Marina Warner provided a typically scintillating tour d’horizon of a contemporary fantasy boom in which novelists such as Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman and Ali Smith rewrite myths and folk tales, Hollywood increasingly borrows its heroines and child adventurers (explicitly or ultimately) from the same sources or revisits legendary ancient history, and Greek drama about “the home life of the gods” is back in fashion. What was it about these “old stories” that attracted her panellists, as children and now, she asked, and why do they seem to connect with the 21st-century zeitgeist?

For Helen Oyeyemi, who refashioned the Snow White story in Boy, Snow, Bird, fairytales appealed as a child because of their “quests” (she cited Gerda’s in The Snow Queen) and “magical objects” such as the talking mirror in Snow White; the latter still fascinate her and are part of her fiction, she said, as “a way of thinking about objects, reimagining them”. Dubravka Ugrešić, the Croatian-born essayist and novelist, spoke of being drawn as a girl to folk tales such as Russian stories of the “hag” Baba Yaga (updated in her novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg), followed by a more “political” awareness of their significance in being outside a “canon” dominated by white, male, western European or American authors in which “women do not fare well”; whereas they are “emancipated” and “more comfortable in the sort of illegal space they occupy in fairy stories and children’s literature”.

Continue reading...