Rediscovering Fairy Tales

I don't know what got me started on re-reading the classics. Whatever it was, I'm at once glad and disturbed at what I'm reading.

I started off with something "nice", fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. The first story I read was "The Little Match Girl". I had loved the story when I was a kid. The idea of the grandmother coming to comfort the poor, shivering little girl in the "magical" light of the matches she lights to keep her warm seemed truly fairy-tale-ish, warm and feel-good.

But then I analysed it, as did a few of my students in Project Ora, and what we discovered horrifies me. Think about it. Here's a poor, ragged child, no one to call her own, alone and wandering in a great, cold city in Europe. She is afraid to go back home because she hasn't sold any matches. Her father is bound to beat her black and blue for failing to bring home money.

She sees the rich enjoying their great Christmas dinners and knows she hasn't a hope in heck of ever getting such a dinner herself.

So what does the poor thing do? In her innocence, she lights a few matches, hoping the flames will provide at least illusory warmth. It does, and the illusion extends to her dream about the only human being, now long dead, who had ever shown her any love.

And in the morning she is dead, a beatific smile upon her face.

The fairy tale, in my opinion, is no fairy tale, but Andersen's clever way of bringing out the sheer cruelty and callousness of the human race. Rather than be brutal, he clothes it in magic and matches and hopes the reader will see below the skein of fancy to understand the grim reality of poverty.

I wanted to read this story for an audio book. Like "Lord Ullin's Daughter", it's taking me a long time to do. I keep choking on the horror of the knowledge that Andersen's tale still comes true for children across the world - and it's no fairy tale for them.