Once Upon a Time by Jane Danner

 

Once Upon a Time

By Miss Jane

 

Once Upon a Time, there was a grandmother. Her own six children had all grown up and left, one by one to live their own great adventures. That old grandmother was sad and lonely. And so that grandmother went out into the great wide world looking for some children who might need her. And she did. She found seven wonderful children who welcomed her with open arms and let her care for them. And she was happy. 

 

There are so many things that have changed since I was a little girl. Phones are no longer rotary. They are not even attached to the wall! Test patterns no longer mark the end of television for the day. Car seats. I-pads. Google Searches!  Children seem to grow up very differently today than I did 50 years ago. And yet, I invite you to peer into The Woodland Suite on any given day at about 12:45 in the afternoon. We’ve just said a fond farewell to Linden, who spends her afternoons at home. The shades are pulled, the lights are off. A minute ago, the suite was restless and noisy but now all the children are on their cots. Hugo has Red Baby snuggled under his arm. Pim has his bunnies and robin hidden under the blankets, Vera has ghost doggie snuggled close and Moss has the rabbit from the windowsill which he thinks he has snuck when I wasn’t looking. Clara has her thumb stuck in her mouth and has sighed contentedly. And, Leo always mentions his dad as he snuggles up in his cozy bed.  All of them are listening to a story written down over 150 years ago. “Once upon a time there lived a donkey…” Just like me, when I was little, they listen intently or nonchalantly, but they are listening. And when it ends, they are calm and quiet and just drifting off to sleep. 

It is amazing to me that these Paw Patrol and Star Wars children still love “Sweet Porridge” and “Iron Hans”, “The Bremen Town Musicians” and “The Donkey” and “Mother Holle”, “Rapunzel” and “Snow White” as much as I did. Every year I tell the same stories that my father told me and the children never seem to tire of hearing them. They listen intently as the mother goat cuts open the belly of the wolf to let out her six children. They listen as she stuffs rocks into his belly and then sews him up while the wolf snores away under the shade of the old oak tree. Really? The wolf did not notice he was being sliced open with a scissors? But the children never ask, in the same accepting way that I never asked. It just seemed right.

The Brothers Grimm wrote these stories down from oral tales. They were one of the first to take these tales seriously and they collected the stories from all over Europe, tales that had been told for many generations mainly by women. These were not the epic tales of King Arthur or Roland, which were told in the main hall by paid roving minstrels. These were simple old wife’s tales, the wisdom of women, told by nannies who were immigrants and slaves and tended the children, telling the tales that they had heard as children when they tucked their charges into bed at night. Words to help children learn the lessons of perseverance, kindness, compassion, and life. It explains why the tales are so like other tales told from all over the world. And from this rich oral tradition of storytelling Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm published seven different editions of children’s tales. The first edition was much criticized and not considered suitable for children so they rewrote and edited them, careful to keep the folk tradition of the original oral stories alive because the Brothers Grimm felt the fairy tales told a story deeper than the tales themselves. When I watch the children listen so intently day after day, I think so too. And because of the success of their endeavor fairy tales came to be collected from all over the world. Do a google search of fairy tales and every culture has a rich collection of fairy tales. 

I love that a famous quote of Albert Einstein says that “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them Fairy Tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more Fairy Tales.” I also agree with the early criticism of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Not all the tales are suitable for the young child. At one point in my parenting, I decided to read Carl, my youngest son, the whole collection cover to cover. At the time it seemed like a good idea but I quickly abandoned it. It was interesting and educational, and I enjoyed reading the more traditional translations and the many stories I had never read before. There are 279 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but many of the tales are just strange and read more like ghost stories. When I first began to tell them to the children in my care, I decided it was best to stay with the stories I was most familiar with. More recently I have found a few lists of tales that more experienced Waldorf teachers have put together. They have helped me explore tales I had not previously known about and adventure into Russian, Native American, Danish, Irish and Chinese Fairy Tales. Even with my lists in hand, I always read the tales myself before I read them to the children.

There are many different theories as to why these tales are so enduring. Some have written that the tales are a picture of being human and that “all the figures in a tale are but parts or aspects of a single synthetic person” (Novalis: What to do about witches by Ruth Pusch). That is why the children do not view the violence in them quite the same way as we adults might. Nor do they seem to react to the violence in the same way as they do to things they might see in a movie or on television. In their imaginations they recognize the characters as archetypes, as pieces of themselves that they are just coming to know. “There is no human problem or difficulty, no possible situation in life that is outside the wisdom of fairy tales” (The Wisdom of Fairy Tales by Ursula Grahl).

Children do seem to have a healthy satisfaction for the justice doled out to the many different antagonists in the end of the tales. They love that Gretel pushes the witch in the oven or that the sorceress in The Golden Bauer becomes trapped in the cage of her own making. It is a satisfaction that seems to be dampened when the tales are made nicer or completely missing when the tales are rewritten so that the antagonist becomes the protagonist but there also seems to be a rightness that the stories are still changing and evolving, as we tell them again and again. It speaks to the fact that they are really living and alive.

Many things change in a lifetime, but it seems that one thing that lives on is some old tales told from the wisdom of women to the children they loved that two brothers had the wisdom and foresight to write down and left to us to powerfully feed our souls.