Why do the fairy tales world-wide reiterate common themes? Although the settings are different, the promises and opportunities for good or ill are repetitive and the beliefs strikingly similar. Of course the impossible - living happily ever after - is a given. Familiar themes are readily recognizable because all of us on the planet share a common humanity with similar wishes and fears. We've all gone through similar rites of passage.
The Game Board
The Game Board, a story from Ethiopia, is about the private life of a child, a world into which adults never seem able to infiltrate once they've carelessly been enticed by the so-called pleasures of the adult world. In this story, a boy has many adventures, which adult readers will find hardly believable in one so young because these readers are so old. The best events of childhood are truly, and I speak with fading and imperfect memory, those that live in the minds and the hearts of the child within us no matter what our age. These memories belong to childhood and are not to be shared with adults, for adults are no longer capable of understanding as you will soon learn from the unwittingly patronizing attitude of the father.
Game Board
The Frog Princess This Russian tale moves at a good clip. It is all about listening to one's elders and the necessity of making wise choices. Why are frog and toad stories endemic to so many cultures? It is probably due to the proclivity of fairy tales to indulge in transformation at the wave of a wand. In the short term, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella was rather good at it.
Far back in the oral tradition, when fairy tales began around camp fires, the natural world was all that there was. From living and teaching on the edge of the Simpson Desert, where water holes were few and far between, I learned more from Aboriginal children than I care to admit. One day, I took my class out for a nature walk. Four year-old Jimmy Bloomfield, an Aboriginal lad wanted to come along. At first we merely tolerated his presence. Since he had been able to walk, Jimmy had been out exploring the world of witchetty grubs, birds, and who knows what all else sometimes alone and sometimes with an auntie or two collecting sugar bee honey.
Jimmy, totally without fear, would plunge his tiny hand into the hive and break off a chunk of honeycomb. Bees would be swarming all over his arm but as I think I mentioned Jimmy was totally without fear. I failed to mention that the Australian sugar bee has lost the art of stinging. Well actually it hasn't lost the art so much as it has lost its stinger.
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