The Power of Fairy Tales

Once upon a time, the other day, my grandson Eli Weber, 6, lost his first tooth. It felt a little bittersweet. A page had turned in his childhood. First, the Tooth Fairy left him some cash. Second, he got a wallet. Then, I put some money on a credit card, and he put that in his wallet. Now he’s asking grown-up questions like where did I put my wallet? At least he still has enough of that kid magic in him to believe in the Tooth Fairy.

As a young mother, I cringed a bit adding the Tooth Fairy into my children’s collection of stories, knowing I would later be outed. As a grandmother, I’m back to believing in fairy tales myself. Please. Allow me to make my case. 

The great Albert Einstein was once approached by a mother who desperately wanted her young son to grow up to be a scientist like Einstein. What should I read him to prepare his young mind, she asked. Fairy tales, Einstein answered. A little disappointed in the answer, the mother asked, And what after that? More fairy tales, Einstein replied. 

This immediately makes me think of my grandmother Inez, my father’s mother, my own Mother Goose. She read us fairy tales, or just ad-libbed from her memory, as if she were telling wonderful secrets just between us.

She must have done this with my father too. He debated his entire fifth-grade class on the existence of Santa Claus. Finally, he point-blank asked the teacher to back him up. Yes, Santa Claus exists, she said. He rested his case.

Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy stories are pretty tame. I don’t even think they qualify as true fairy tales. Real fairy tales are as old as the human race, mostly told verbally among adults, then later modified for children. Children’s author and illustrator Hans Wilhelm explains (via a YouTube video) the anatomy of a fairy tale as follows.

It begins, he says, with a hero, who happens to be a very ordinary person, like a boy, a girl, or a woodcutter. That’s because the hero is you, says Wilhelm. Then, something happens. Wilhelm calls it drama. Stories such as Hansel and Gretel have passed through some of the darkest times in human history, such as The Great Famine and The Black Death (or Plague) in the 1300s. To describe it would make these pages curl. 

I’m surprised by how much darker these stories are than I remember. Hansel and Gretel were sent into the forest by their parents who needed two less mouths to feed. Really? Why did I put up with this as a kid? Even now, getting bribed into offering my firstborn child to a weird little man named Rumpelstiltskin – unthinkable! And a wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? That hits a little too close to home. Jack and the Beanstalk is pretty tame if you don’t mind a little “fee fie fo fum” and a cannibalistic giant. After testing this out on Eli, that line needs some editing. Stop after “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” The next line is, “Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” Leave that off!

Eli freaked. It took his parents another half-hour of bedtime calming and put me into grandma time-out. I will say, the next morning, Eli asked me to tell him another fairy tale. 

Wilhelm describes this middle part of the fairy tale, the drama that occurs in every life. No matter how dark or how long it lasts, somehow the hero (you, who are kind, clever, and brave) gets through the drama. Wilhelm says the drama reflects our personal journey of our life here on earth. In the end, the hero not only survives, but emerges stronger and wiser. The drama doesn’t happen to you. It happens for you, Wilhelm says. He likens it to the process of chiseling a rough stone into a diamond or an alchemist transforming lead into gold. This, Wilhelm believes, is a law of the universe, working us all through the darkest of times into a better place. 

The message in fairy tales is that you, the individual, have more power than you think. There is good intention in each of us. That’s where the power lies. Fairy tales unleash this inner knowledge and, if understood widely enough, can transform an unfriendly universe by intention alone. 

If we see the universe as an unfriendly place, Einstein contends, we will use science and technology toward our own self-destruction. The contrary, he says, is also true. 

If we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, scientific discoveries, and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. – Albert Einstein

If enough of us believe in the possibilities within our timeless tales, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, we will all, someday, find a way to live happily ever after.